Best practices and tips for creating and managing workstreams


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.


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Summary: ◀▼
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.



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.
This article covers the following topics

Best practices for creating workstreams
Tips for managing workstreams

Related articles:

About Zendesk WFM workstreams
Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Overview



Best practices for creating workstreams

Keep these best practices in mind when creating workstreams:


Start simple. Start with the least complex setup that meets your needs.

Avoid overlap. Make sure your workstreams don’t overlap.

Use fewer conditions. Use the fewest conditions possible to capture the work you
need to measure.

Segment only when needed. 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.

Cover all ticket types. 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.

Keep channels separate. 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.

Report without using workstreams. 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 Accessing historical trends with reports.

Use the browser extension for external work. To track work in external web tools,
use the browser extension and map URLs to a general task or unified agent status. See
Tracking agent time spent outside of Zendesk.

Assign agents when scheduling matters. If you need to schedule agents to work on
a workstream, assign them to that workstream. See Adding and removing users from multiple workstreams in bulk in Zendesk
WFM.

Remember that activity is always tracked. Agent activity is tracked for every
workstream, whether or not the agent is assigned or scheduled to it. See About the Agent activity page.




Tips for managing workstreams

Use these tips to keep workstreams accurate as your team and processes change:


Map general tasks or unified agent statuses to workstreams when needed. 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 Creating workstreams.

Use workstreams that don’t overlap. 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 Monitoring agent activity.

Understand historical volume for your workstreams. See Exporting forecast data.

Revisit workstreams as your organization changes. You can refine workstreams at
any time, but historical reporting uses the configuration that was active when the data
occurred. See Editing workstreams.

Remember historical data doesn’t change. 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.



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