Seeing live agent status with Explore: Use cases

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Using an Explore live dashboard, you can see the current status and workload of your agents. If you’ve turned on omnichannel routing, you can also see which unified and custom statuses agents are in.

Tip: Zendesk now offers real-time monitoring, which enhances your reporting by focusing on use cases, offering immediate decision-making insights, and tracking trends for up to seven days.

This article describes some common use cases for using an Explore live dashboard to effectively monitor your agents’ statuses. The examples in this article are tailored to team leads and supervisors who need to know the status of their agents in order to ensure appropriate staffing levels and workload distribution.

The instructions in this article work for the prebuilt live dashboard as well as any live dashboards built in the beta dashboard builder that have reports with drill in turned on. To create a custom live dashboard that shows you unified, custom, and channel-specific agent statuses at a glance, see Explore recipe: Creating a dashboard to report on live agent status.

Tip: You can also use a live dashboard to change an agent’s status for them. See Changing agent status.

This article contains the following topics:

Use case 1: See which agents are online across all channels (Omnichannel routing only)

Use case 2: See which agents are in a custom status (Omnichannel routing only)

Use case 3: See which agents are online for any channel

Use case 4: See which agents are online for a specific channel

Related articles:

Seeing live agent status and activities with Explore

Overview of the Explore live dashboard

Use case 1: See which agents are online across all channels (Omnichannel routing only)

As a team lead with access to omnichannel routing, you want to see how many agents are online across all channels right now. This gives you an overall picture of your current available staffing, allowing you to make decisions across channels about how much work can be done based on your available agents.

To see which agents are online across all channels

In Explore, click the Dashboard icon ( ) in the left sidebar.

Click the Live data dashboard, or select a custom live dashboard.

Click any agent status metric and select Drill in.

In the Agent workload vs. capacity window, click Filter and select Unified status > Online.

The list shows agents who are online across all channels.

Use case 2: See which agents are in a custom status (Omnichannel routing only)

As a team lead, you want to see which agents are listed as In training, a custom status your organization created. Based on the way your organization created the custom status, you know that agents in training are available to be assigned Support tickets, but are not available to take calls or messages. This helps you understand which agents aren’t currently available to handle time-sensitive work.

To see which agents are in a custom status

Tip: If you already have the Agent workload vs. capacity window open, skip to step 4.

In Explore, click the Dashboard icon ( ) in the left sidebar.

Click the Live data dashboard, or select a custom live dashboard.

Click any agent status metric and select Drill in.

In the Agent workload vs. capacity window, click Filter and select Unified status > In training (or whichever custom status you’re interested in).

The list shows agents who are in the custom status you selected.

Use case 3: See which agents are online for any channel

As a team lead without access to omnichannel routing, you want to see how many agents are online across any channel right now. This gives you an overall picture of your current available staffing, allowing you to make decisions across channels about how much work can be done based on your available agents.

To see which agents are online for any channel

Tip: If you already have the Agent workload vs. capacity window open, skip to step 4.

In Explore, click the Dashboard icon ( ) in the left sidebar.

Click the Live data dashboard, or select a custom live dashboard.

Click any agent status metric and select Drill in.

In the Agent workload vs. capacity window, click Filter and select Status by channel > Online.

The list shows agents who are online for any channel.

Use case 4: See which agents are online for a specific channel

As a team lead, you want to see which agents are online for calls, regardless of their status in other channels. This helps you focus your attention on agents who are currently available to handle calls, without worrying about availability for other channels.

To see which agents are online for a specific channel

Tip: If you already have the Agent workload vs. capacity window open, skip to step 4. If you followed use case 3, skip to step 5.

In Explore, click the Dashboard icon ( ) in the left sidebar.

Click the Live data dashboard, or select a custom live dashboard.

Click any agent status metric and select Drill in.

In the Agent workload vs. capacity window, click Filter and select Status by channel > Online.

Click Filter again and select Channel > Talk.

The list shows agents who are online for the voice channel.