What's new in Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM)

Last year, Zendesk acquired Tymeshift, which has now officially been rebranded as Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM). Zendesk WFM stands as the most efficient solution for agent management within Zendesk, leveraging AI to predict staffing needs with precision, automate agent scheduling based on these projects, and provide insightful real-time and historical analytics on team performance.

We’re excited to announce the latest integrations and enhancements within the Zendesk platform, including the advent of Zendesk WFM, a singular, cohesive workforce management add-on replacing the previous Tymeshift Professional and Enterprise plans, now exclusively designed for our Zendesk customers. Keep on reading to discover more exciting features and updates within workforce management:

Adding WFM to the Zendesk product tray for easier access

Zendesk WFM officially has a new icon for an integrated Zendesk platform experience—admins in Zendesk can now access Workforce Management directly from the product tray at the top right corner of their screen.

Newly designed pages

General tasks
Admins can now set up General Tasks in Zendesk WFM, which allows them to track time for activities or tasks that happen outside of the Zendesk platform (such as lunch breaks, meetings, training, and QA). This also allows managers and admins to view the time recorded on the Agent Activity Page.

Account settings page
In this newly designed page, admins can set the following options for their support team:

– Time preferences, such as time zones and week starts.
– Tracking: Admins can set if the task lock button is visible to all agents in the top bar app. If this setting is toggled off, then the Task lock button will not appear.
– Top bar options: Admins can set if the actual numerical timer is visible to all agents in the top bar app. This timer shows how long an activity has been running. If this setting is toggled off, then the timer does not appear. Admins can also set if the General Tasks selection dropdown is displayed to all agents in the top bar app. If this setting is toggled off, then agents will no longer be able to manually select a General Task.

Creation and management of roles that grant access to features

Roles and Permissions ensure that users only have access to the Zendesk WFM features they need to use. Permissions are a way for users within any given account to be granted (or get revoked) a set of rules that allow them to see or access certain parts of Zendesk WFM. The Permissions tab is segmented by area or general purpose of the page (Forecasting & scheduling, Reporting, Admin, and Agent).

Additionally, every account has two default roles: Admin and Agent. Users that have the Admin default role assigned have permissions to access all the Zendesk WFM features, whereas the Agent default role has access only to Agent Schedule. However, the permissions and scopes for Agents cannot be changed, while Admins have the flexibility to create customer roles however they see fit.

Improved Public API

We continue the improvements over the Public API, launching our second endpoint to give our customers flexibility on how to use their data inside other platforms.

User management page

This page allows admins and managers to see their team members’ details (i.e., shifts, workstreams, status, etc.). At the top right corner of the page, there is an option to resync the list of users that is presented in the User Management page. This can be helpful when you have just created a new user in Zendesk Support or changed some settings that you want immediately reflected in Zendesk WFM.

Coming soon on Zendesk WFM

The horizon of workforce management is about to expand with more game-changing updates within Zendesk WFM. New customers employing OCR can wave goodbye to configuring general tasks and say hello to a seamless import of Unified Agent Status. Revolutionizing scheduling adherence, the intuitive mapping of Agent Status to work streams will enhance both planning and analysis.

The innovations don’t stop there—with the power to adjust multiple shift times simultaneously and differentiate between published shifts and those in the queue, managers will wield unparalleled control over the scheduling process. Customers will also benefit from better clarity of a weekly staffing overview, mirroring the existing daily view, and a lens into workstream efficiency with enriched occupancy reports. Stay tuned to find out more about the features.