Seeing live agent status and activities with Explore

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Using live dashboards in Explore, you can see which agents are online and which open tickets, conversations or chats, and calls they’re assigned to. This real-time capacity reporting helps supervisors balance availability and workloads across teams, as well as monitor individual agent performance, all from a central dashboard.

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 enabled.

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 includes the following topics:

Viewing agent status and workload

Seeing which open work items are assigned to an agent

Changing agent status

Related articles:

Seeing live agent status with Explore: Use cases

Overview of the Explore live dashboard

Viewing agent status and workload

You can drill into a live dashboard to see which statuses agents are in and what their workloads are across channels.

If you’ve turned on omnichannel routing, you can also see which custom statuses agents are in and what their workload capacity is across channels.

Important: If you don't use omnichannel routing, get the most value out of this information by reminding your agents to sign in and out of Zendesk to accurately represent their shifts. This is particularly important for the Support channel, where only two default agent states are reported (Online and Offline). If agents don’t sign out, Explore will show them as always online. For more information, see Why does the Explore dashboard show too many online agents?

To view agent status and workload

In Explore, click the Dashboard icon ( ).

Open a live dashboard.

(Optional) Filter the dashboard based on the specific groups or brands you want to see. You can choose up to five attribute values per filter.

Click any agent status metric and select Drill in. Agent status metrics include Agents online, Agents offline, Agents away, Agents invisible, and Agents transfer only, as well as custom statuses created as part of omnichannel routing.

Note: If you drill into a live agent status metric with more than 100 agents, you won't see the list of agents in that status. Use dashboard filters to lower the number of agents that a live metric reflects. When you do, you'll be able to see the list of agents when you drill into the metric.

The Agent workload vs. capacity window opens, showing a list of agents and the following columns:

Status: Which default or custom status each agent is currently in. If you use omnichannel routing, this column is called Unified status

Time in status: How long each agent has been in their current status

Emails: How many tickets each agent is assigned to

Messages: How many active messaging conversations each agent has

Chats: How many chats each agent is currently handling

Calls: How many calls each agent is currently handling

If you use omnichannel routing, hover over the Emails, Messages, Chats, or Calls column to see the number of work items assigned to an agent compared to their set capacity. A dash (-) in the Emails, Messages, Chats, or Calls column means the agent does not have access to that channel (if you're filtering by unified status), or the agent is not in the status for that channel (if you're filtering by a channel-specific status).

If you don't use omnichannel routing, a dash always appears in these columns because capacity information is not available without omnichannel routing.

(Optional) Click Filter to filter the list by the following options:

Channel: Includes Email, Messaging or Chat, and Talk.

Status by channel: Includes the agent statuses that apply to individual channels.

Group: (Appears only if you filtered the dashboard by group in step 3 above) Includes the groups in your account.

Unified status: (Appears only if you use omnichannel routing) Includes the default unified agent statuses and any custom statuses you've created.

You can filter by multiple channels and statuses at the same time. When filtering, note that some channel-specific statuses (like Invisible for Chat) are not reflected by the default unified statuses. Additionally, custom statuses can be mapped to different statuses for each channel. If you don't see the results you expect, check the filters to make sure you're not unintentionally excluding agents based on channel or custom status.

Depending on which live agent status metric you drilled into in step 4, filters might already be applied to the list. For example, if you drilled into the Support - Agents online metric, the results are pre-filtered by the Email channel and the Online status.

Tip: If you’ve turned on omnichannel routing, you have access to unfiltered unified agent status live metrics.

When you filter by channel, the list shows only the workload columns that apply to the selected channels. For example, if you filter by Talk, you'll see the Calls column, but not the Emails, Messages, or Chats columns.

Note that the Agent workload vs. capacity window doesn't update in real time when it's open and no actions are being performed. When you take an action (such as updating an agent status or changing your filters) or close and reopen the window, the data is refreshed.

Tip: For more about effectively monitoring agent status with an Explore live dashboard, see Seeing live agent status with Explore: Use cases.

Seeing which open work items are assigned to an agent

After opening the list of agents, you can select a specific agent to see which open work items are assigned to them.

To see which open work items are assigned to an agent

Open the Agent workload vs. capacity window.

Search for a specific agent in the search bar at the top. Search results are limited to 50 results. Make sure your search is as specific as possible so you can find the agent you want.
Use a caret (^) to specify that the agent's name must start with your exact search term. (For example, ^Alex will return "Alex Jensen," but not "Maria Alexander.")

Select the agent you want to see work items for.
The Agent work items window appears and shows the agent's overall status and status for each channel, along with details about the tickets, messaging conversations or chats, and calls the agent is working on.

The Time in status shown is the time for the channel you selected when you first drilled in. For example, if you drilled into this screen from a Support metric, the time in status shown is the time active for the Support channel.

If you use omnichannel routing, this window also shows the agent’s capacity underneath their status for each channel. See Creating capacity rules to balance agent workload for more information on setting agent capacity.

(Optional) Use the Filter drop-down to select a channel and see only work items for that channel.

Select a work item to see more details.
For each ticket, the window shows the following details:

Requester: The user who is asking for support through a ticket

Ticket ID: The unique ID number of the ticket

Status: What status the ticket is currently in (New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Closed)

Account name: The Zendesk account name (described in Branding the Support interface)

Date requested: The date the ticket was submitted

Priority: How urgent the ticket is

Group: What group the ticket is currently assigned to

Last updated: The date the ticket was last updated

For each messaging conversation, the window shows the following details:

Requester: The name of the user the agent is messaging with

Ticket ID: The unique ID number of the ticket

Originating channel: The channel that the conversation started on. Possible values include Email and Messaging.

Duration: How long the agent has been working on the ongoing conversation

For each chat, the window shows the following details:

Requester: The name of the user the agent is chatting with

Chat ID: The unique ID number of the chat

Originating channel: The channel that the message came from. Possible values include Facebook Messenger and Chat.

Duration: How long the chat has been active

For each call, the window shows the following details:

Caller: The phone number of the caller

Call ID: The unique ID number of the ticket associated with the call

Call type: The type of call (described in Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Talk)

Duration: How long the call has been going on

Changing agent status

From the list of agents, users with permission can change the status of a single agent or multiple agents. To change agent status, you must be a Support admin (all plans) or have a custom role with the Change agent status setting (Enterprise plans only). See Giving users access to Explore.

For example, you might change an agent's status if they completed their shift but forgot to sign out to mark themselves unavailable.

To change agent status

Open the Agent workload vs. capacity window.

Select the check box to the left of each agent you want to change the status of. You may select up to 500 agents at a time.
If you search for an agent, search results are limited to 50 results. Make sure your search is as specific as possible so you can find the agent you want.

In the bottom bar, click Change status and select the status you want to set for the agent.
To select a custom status, click Other statuses and then select the appropriate custom status.

When you select a status, the agent’s status is immediately updated. You don’t need to save or confirm.

Note: Currently, when a manager or supervisor changes an agent’s status for them, that change isn’t reflected in the Account status or Department status condition in Chat triggers for the “Messaging” and “Chat and messaging” channels. However, these conditions work correctly when the agent updates their own status.