Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Overview

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Add-on | Workforce Management (WFM) or Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)

Zendesk Workforce management (WFM) expands Zendesk’s feature set by improving the predictability and efficiency of customer service organizations through its wide range of planning, scheduling and monitoring tools. It eliminates the need to track schedules and assignments in spreadsheets, gives you a bird’s-eye view of agent adherence and activities across channels, and automates time-off requests and approvals.

If you’re new to WFM, you’ll benefit from reading through this introduction to learn how Zendesk WFM’s key features work together to support your WFM needs.

This article contains the following sections:

Introduction to Zendesk WFM

Who uses Zendesk WFM and when

More resources and next steps

Introduction to Zendesk WFM

WFM provides a framework for businesses to strategically run their operations. Zendesk WFM powers the planning and monitoring that are foundational to WFM. It facilitates resource planning and management across your organization in the near and long term. Key features include:

Work segmentation

Forecast and scheduling

Real-time monitoring

Seamless agent experience

Work segmentation

Zendesk WFM helps you segment your organization’s work and develop forecasts and schedules based on that segmentation. Its segmentation feature, workstreams, allow you to organize your work via channels, agent groups, and teams. Workstreams also serve as the basis for your forecast, shifts and schedules. Additionally, performance within workstreams can be monitored and measured both daily and over time so that you and your team can iterate on your WFM planning for optimal results.

Forecast and scheduling

After establishing workstreams, you can build forecasts and schedules. Zendesk WFM draws on historical data of inbound ticket or call volume to automatically create a forecast of your required staffing. You can adjust the forecast based on channel, occupancy rate, average handle time (AHT), or service level targets. With the forecast, managers receive up-to-date inputs that help ensure staffing is adequate when creating shifts and schedules.

Real-time monitoring

In addition to planning tools, Zendesk WFM also provides real-time insights into agent attendance, status, and activity. Managers can quickly see who has clocked in, monitor adherence patterns, and determine whether ticketing work is on track. You can even drill into each individual agent’s work and view the ticket they’re working on.

Zooming out from those granular views, you can also access customizable dashboards and flexible reports. These show you how you’re performing, or have performed, against commonly held metrics such as first response time or AHT.

Seamless agent experience

Agents use Zendesk WFM from the Agent Schedule app in Zendesk Support. Agents can clock in and out of ticketing work, view and request changes to their schedules, or trade shifts with coworkers. With these centralized tools, Zendesk WFM gives agents more transparency into their workday.

Who uses Zendesk WFM and when

Zendesk WFM supports many roles within a customer service organization. Depending on your organization’s size and complexity, these roles may include a system admin, workforce planner and scheduler, manager, analyst, and agent. Larger companies tend to separate out these roles. Smaller companies often rely on the same role to fulfill many responsibilities.

To get started, it’s important to understand how and when your team will use Zendesk WFM. Generally, the range of tasks supported by Zendesk WFM occur at these intervals:

Quarterly — Plan, set up and grant access, then forecast

Monthly, weekly — Schedule

Daily — Monitor, enter time

The following example demonstrates how you and your team can use Zendesk WFM to plan your schedule and your resourcing needs at different intervals.

Quarterly

Anne is a workforce planner at Eatwell, a food delivery organization. She's been asked to hire 100 new agents in the next quarter in advance of the summer months because her global teams typically see sharp spikes in food orders and ticket volume.

Using Zendesk WFM, Anne can forecast and plan for these hiring needs. She'll review past quarters’ inbound volume and review both team and individual performance metrics against that volume to determine her actual resource needs.

Monthly

Charles is a manager of the San Francisco location of Eatwell and builds the schedule for his team. A new feature is going to be released next month and he’s confident that this will result in an increase in tickets based on historical data of his team’s new releases.

In Zendesk WFM, he adjusts next month's schedule so that 25% more agents are working chat and voice channels when the feature releases.

Daily

Charles can also use Zendesk WFM after the new feature releases to monitor how well his team is handling the surge in tickets. He can get a bird’s-eye view of his team's performance with dashboards and reports. If there's anything that captures his attention, he can get a more granular view of any workstream, team, or agent.

Iris is an agent at Eatwell who just won a concert ticket and wants to leave early the day of the concert. She can check her schedule from within Zendesk Support and request to trade shifts with a coworker.

More resources and next steps

Depending on your role in setting up or using Zendesk WFM, review the following:

Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Admin guide

Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Manager guide

Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Agent guide