Workforce management glossary

What's my plan?

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

Zendesk Workforce management (WFM) automatically tracks a variety of metrics, including:

Adherence

Attendance

Concurrency

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)

General Task Time

Intraday

Locations

Multiple Workstreams

New Ticket

No Workstreams

Occupancy

Shrinkage

Staffing

Adherence: How effectively an agent follows their schedule.

Attendance: Attendance refers to the total hours agents work within their scheduled time. This includes the time spent handling customer interactions, as well as non-work related tasks such as breaks.

Concurrency: The maximum number of chats an agent can work on simultaneously. The industry standard is between 1 and 2, depending on the business and market.

Full Time Equivalent (FTE): A unit of measurement that indicates the workload of an employed person.

General Task Time: Any time that is tracked on a general task rather than a specific ticket. General tasks are created to track an agent's time without them being clocked into a ticket. For example, time spent on administrative work, meetings, and breaks.

Intraday: Activities that happen within a single day. These include the tasks agents are going to perform throughout their day, as well as start and end times.

Locations: The different sets of conditions that shifts might have. Specifically, for each location, you can set your operational hours, the number of maximum hours per week, time zones, and all of the details of your shifts.

Multiple Workstreams: Tickets that meet the conditions for two or more workstreams simultaneously.

New Ticket: How an agent is tracked for a newly created ticket that is not submitted.

No Workstreams: No Workstream refers to the identification of a ticket when it fails to satisfy the conditions set by any workstreams.

Occupancy: The time agents are actively engaged in handling customer interactions and performing work-related tasks divided by their total working time. Higher occupancy rates indicate that agents have sufficient workloads and are spending their time handling customer interactions.

Staffing: The process of managing your workforce to ensure that the right number of agents are available to fulfill operational demands.

Shrinkage: Limitations to agents' availability to take work. Internal factors that can cause shrinkage include lunch breaks, training sessions, scheduled meetings, and work done between calls. External shrinkage factors include absenteeism, holiday, vacation, sick days, lateness, and leaving early.