Agent status plays a critical role in ensuring smooth and efficient contact center operations. Sometimes, admins need to update an agent’s status manually. For example, an agent finishes their shift but forgets to sign out or sets their status to offline.
The real time monitoring assistant helps admins update the agent's status from the incoming tickets or agent productivity real time monitoring dashboards using a conversational assistant to reflect that the agent is no longer available and prevent tickets from being routed to them.
This helps ensure reporting accuracy, maintain service levels, and support both agents and customers.
This article contains the following topics:
- Preparing to use the real time monitoring assistant
- Signing up for the real time monitoring assistant EAP
- Accessing the real time monitoring assistant
- Auditing actions taken by the monitoring assistant
- Current limitations
Preparing to use the real time monitoring assistant
To use the monitoring assistant, ensure that the following prerequisites are in place:
- Your account has access to the real time monitoring dashboards.
- Your account has omnichannel routing enabled. See Turning on omnichannel routing.
- You have Explore admin or editor permissions. See Giving users access to Explore.
- You've signed up for the real time monitoring assistant EAP.
If you're using an Enterprise plan, you can configure a custom role with the change agent status setting that allows your account to change agent status. See Creating custom roles and assigning agents.
Signing up for the real time monitoring assistant EAP
You can sign up for the real time monitoring assistant EAP from Admin Center.
To sign up for the EAP
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Roles > Workspaces > Analytics.
- On the Analytics page, select Monitoring assistant (EAP).
- Review the terms and conditions, then click Save.
The EAP will be activated in your account.
Accessing the real time monitoring assistant
If you've signed up for the EAP, you'll find the monitoring assistant icon in the real time monitoring prebuilt dashboards.
- In the Zendesk product tray, click Analytics.
- Analytics opens on the dashboards library page.
- Click the real-time monitoring home icon (
).
The real-time monitoring home page opens. - In the incoming tickets or agent productivity dashboard, click the Agent availability tab.
- Click the monitoring assistant icon
.
- Specify the agent or list of agents whose status you want to change.
Auditing actions taken by the monitoring assistant
The monitoring assistant functions similarly to the take an action capability in Explore. Agents are not notified when their status is updated. However, all actions taken using the monitoring assistant are viewable in audit logs, similar to the screenshot below:
Current limitations
The real time monitoring assistant currently has the following limitations:
- If a user doesn’t enter a command for 10 minutes, the monitoring assistant panel will refresh, meaning they have to start the flow again.
- If the user doesn’t confirm their action after two minutes, the action will expire, and they will be prompted to start the flow again.
- Users must provide the agent’s full name to change their status; partial names are not accepted. For example, entering "Rob" instead of "Robert" for the first name, or "Doe" instead of "Doe-Bell" for the surname, will not be recognized.
- Fetching agent information based on groups is not currently supported. As a result, you cannot identify the correct agent using group parameters. If multiple agents have the same name, the user must provide the correct email address to validate the agent.
- There is a limit of 500 characters in the input box for the monitoring assistant.
- If an agent has not logged in since OCR was enabled for the account, it is not possible to change their status using the monitoring assistant.
- Currently, you cannot bulk update agent statuses.
- Currently, up to four custom status suggestions are shown when the user clicks the option to change agents to a custom status. If the required status is not among the suggestions, you must enter the full status name manually.