For support managers and team leads, lack of team visibility can add stress to an already stressful time of year, particularly for distributed teams. Self-reporting can only go so far; without knowing how long people are spending on specific tasks or which tasks they're getting stuck on, providing the right trainings and coaching opportunities can feel difficult. Not to mention the fact that the lack of clarity means any plans for the future rest on a shaky foundational understanding of the team's time.
Understand how agents spend time—whether for coaching, planning, or operations
Assembled has made gathering real-time analytics and comprehensive reporting on team performance as straightforward as navigating to the right dashboard. Our new Agent Activity Report furthers this visibility by displaying an overlapping timeline of an agent's schedule, actual activity, and the overlap between the two—also known as adherence.
Tracking adherence leads to tangible benefits for agents and managers alike—if agents in a particular queue or channel are consistently getting stuck on a single type of task, it may be an indicator that additional trainings are needed or that there are individual coaching opportunities to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Improve efficiency by analyzing schedule adherence
The Agent Activity Report gives managers a granular sense of the team's schedule adherence, or the amount of agent time actually spent in accordance with their scheduled tasks as a proportion of their total scheduled time. Although this is a notoriously difficult metric to track, the new Agent Activity Report takes the guesswork out of this calculation. Instead, adherence is expressed as a simple percentage which requires no manual calculation.
Making improvements in adherence involves acknowledging the reality of when your team was available versus when they were scheduled to be available, and working to close the gap between the two. These improvements ultimately benefit both the team and your customer. With Assembled’s real-time data, Stripe was able to fix issues as they arise in the moment and improve their schedule adherence by 33%, leading to shorter wait times for customers and increased team efficiency internally which, in turn, made planning for the reality of the work week a more repeatable and reliable process.
How it works
To start using the Agent Activity Report, follow the one-time Agent State configuration process. You'll then have access to up-to-the-minute data in your Dashboard to help you better understand where your team spends time and where to focus your attention in order to improve your team's efficiency.
- Note: As a quick refresher, Agent States are imported from the contact platform(s) your team uses and allow you to quickly see the number of agents who are "Online" or "Away" to reconcile scheduled events with actual metrics and agent activity.
The Agent Activity Report uses this information to display agents’ scheduled events for the day along with a real-time breakdown of each agent’s individual states throughout the day. This has three components, as seen in the image above:
- Schedule: the agent’s scheduled events for a day, taken directly from Assembled or imported from Google Calendar
- Platform data (Kustomer in this example): the actual record of agent activity, imported directly from your contact platform and accurate to the minute
- Adherence: the comparison between the two, represented by straightforward green and red blocks
- Green indicates an agent was in adherence
- Red indicates an agent was out of adherence
- Blank spaces indicate non-productive or "offline” time
This can then be filtered by Channel, Queue, Site, Skill, or Team to select an individual agent allowing managers and team leads to see the agent’s daily adherence as a simple percentage along with additional information about the event, the agent's expected state and their actual state.
View a single timeline of activity across Zendesk, Kustomer, Intercom, and more
The Agent Activity Report also stores and displays historical records of agent states so that you can track trends over time or zero in on a specific day—to investigate the root cause of a specific disruption, for example. This data will exist for as long as you have been tracking Agent States, making historical data analysis as simple as a couple of clicks whether you're interested in last week or last year.
Whether you ultimately use this data for coaching, planning or operational purposes, this additional level of accessible insight is critical to providing a full and realistic picture of the team's capacity and activity. We're working closely with the agents and managers using this feature as it develops to ensure that it's as helpful as possible and we look forward to seeing the improved results for customers, agents and managers alike!
