Best practices and tips for creating and managing workstreams

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<p id="docs-hc-snippet" style="display: none;">Use workstreams in Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM) to organize incoming ticket work for tracking, reporting, forecasting, and scheduling. This article provides best practices for planning, creating, and managing workstreams so you can keep your configuration simple, accurate, and useful for reporting.</p>
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<p id="docs-ai-summary-content">Use workstreams to organize ticket work for tracking, reporting, forecasting, and scheduling. Start simple, avoid overlap, and segment only when needed to improve accuracy. Cover all ticket types and keep channels separate for clear data. Assign agents if scheduling is required. Regularly revisit and adjust workstreams as your team and processes evolve, keeping in mind historical data remains unchanged for accurate reporting.</p>
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<div class="body">
<p class="p">Use workstreams in Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM) to organize incoming ticket work for
tracking, reporting, forecasting, and scheduling. This article provides best practices for
planning, creating, and managing workstreams so you can keep your configuration simple,
accurate, and useful for reporting.</p>
<p class="p">This article covers the following topics</p>
<ul class="ul">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_nz1_2hx_hjc">Best practices for creating workstreams</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_acg_rhx_hjc">Tips for managing workstreams</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="p">Related articles:</p>
<ul class="ul">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6443314489242" target="_blank">About Zendesk WFM workstreams</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6514644101914" target="_blank">Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Overview</a></li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_nz1_2hx_hjc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">Best practices for creating workstreams</h2>
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<p class="p">Keep these best practices in mind when creating workstreams:</p>
<ul class="ul">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Start simple.</strong> Start with the least complex setup that meets your needs.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Avoid overlap.</strong> Make sure your workstreams don’t overlap.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use fewer conditions.</strong> Use the fewest conditions possible to capture the work you
need to measure.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Segment only when needed.</strong> Segment workstreams by language, location, knowledge
area, skills, or brands when you need more detail. Add more segmentation only when it
improves forecasting or reporting accuracy.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Cover all ticket types.</strong> Cover all of your incoming ticket types. For example,
create one workstream for billing tickets and another for technical support tickets, if
they need different forecasting or staffing.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Keep channels separate.</strong> Avoid mixing tickets from different channels in the same
workstream unless their service level agreement (SLA) and average handling time (AHT) are
similar. Otherwise, the reported and forecasted data might not represent either channel
accurately, which can lead to misleading results.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Report without using workstreams.</strong> If you need to track and report only, you can
do that without workstreams. Reporting can still filter by ticket tags, groups, agents,
and more. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6514633060634#topic_ohq_33l_d1c" target="_blank">Accessing historical trends with reports</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use the browser extension for external work.</strong> To track work in external web tools,
use the browser extension and map URLs to a general task or unified agent status. See
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6676772528026" target="_blank">Tracking agent time spent outside of Zendesk</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Assign agents when scheduling matters.</strong> If you need to schedule agents to work on
a workstream, assign them to that workstream. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/9822760145818" target="_blank">Adding and removing users from multiple workstreams in bulk in Zendesk
WFM</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Remember that activity is always tracked.</strong> Agent activity is tracked for every
workstream, whether or not the agent is assigned or scheduled to it. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6443347506970" target="_blank">About the Agent activity page</a>.</li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_acg_rhx_hjc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">Tips for managing workstreams</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Use these tips to keep workstreams accurate as your team and processes change:</p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_acg_rhx_hjc__ul_zwl_c2n_kjc">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Map general tasks or unified agent statuses to workstreams when needed.</strong> When
agents are scheduled for work that isn’t directly ticket-related, but they’re still
expected or allowed to open tickets, map a general task or unified agent status to
workstreams. This way, agents can remain in that status and still be considered in
adherence when they open a ticket from a mapped workstream. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6443314489242#topic_br5_tjz_11c" target="_blank">Creating workstreams</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use workstreams that don’t overlap.</strong> If a ticket matches multiple workstreams, you
might see black activities on the Agent activity page. Inspect the ticket to understand
which conditions are causing the overlap. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6443347506970#topic_ub5_whd_tzb" target="_blank">Monitoring agent activity</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Understand historical volume</strong> for your workstreams. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/9940054229402#topic_sm3_nzl_dgc" target="_blank">Exporting forecast data</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Revisit workstreams as your organization changes.</strong> You can refine workstreams at
any time, but historical reporting uses the configuration that was active when the data
occurred. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6443314489242#topic_qg3_rkz_11c" target="_blank">Editing workstreams</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Remember historical data doesn’t change.</strong> Later changes to workstreams, teams,
assignments, and similar settings don’t rewrite past data. For example, if workstream A
includes tickets for Group A until the last week and then changes to include tickets from
Groups A and B, reporting for earlier periods still reflects only Group A tickets. The
same is true for all WFM settings, including agents assigned to different teams. For
example, if you remove a user from WFM, their historical data still appears in reports to
preserve metric accuracy.</li>
</ul>
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