Use workstreams in Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM) to organize incoming ticket work for tracking, reporting, forecasting, and scheduling. This article provides best practices for planning, creating, and managing workstreams so you can keep your configuration simple, accurate, and useful for reporting.

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

Summary: ◀▼

Use workstreams to organize ticket work for tracking, reporting, forecasting, and scheduling. Start simple, avoid overlap, and segment only when needed to improve accuracy. Cover all ticket types and keep channels separate for clear data. Assign agents if scheduling is required. Regularly revisit and adjust workstreams as your team and processes evolve, keeping in mind historical data remains unchanged for accurate reporting.

Use workstreams in Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM) to organize incoming ticket work for tracking, reporting, forecasting, and scheduling. This article provides best practices for planning, creating, and managing workstreams so you can keep your configuration simple, accurate, and useful for reporting.

This article covers the following topics

  • Best practices for creating workstreams
  • Tips for managing workstreams

Related articles:

  • About Zendesk WFM workstreams
  • Getting started with Zendesk WFM: Overview

Best practices for creating workstreams

Keep these best practices in mind when creating workstreams:

  • Start simple. Start with the least complex setup that meets your needs.
  • Avoid overlap. Make sure your workstreams don’t overlap.
  • Use fewer conditions. Use the fewest conditions possible to capture the work you need to measure.
  • Segment only when needed. Segment workstreams by language, location, knowledge area, skills, or brands when you need more detail. Add more segmentation only when it improves forecasting or reporting accuracy.
  • Cover all ticket types. Cover all of your incoming ticket types. For example, create one workstream for billing tickets and another for technical support tickets, if they need different forecasting or staffing.
  • Keep channels separate. Avoid mixing tickets from different channels in the same workstream unless their service level agreement (SLA) and average handling time (AHT) are similar. Otherwise, the reported and forecasted data might not represent either channel accurately, which can lead to misleading results.
  • Report without using workstreams. If you need to track and report only, you can do that without workstreams. Reporting can still filter by ticket tags, groups, agents, and more. See Accessing historical trends with reports.
  • Use the browser extension for external work. To track work in external web tools, use the browser extension and map URLs to a general task or unified agent status. See Tracking agent time spent outside of Zendesk.
  • Assign agents when scheduling matters. If you need to schedule agents to work on a workstream, assign them to that workstream. See Adding and removing users from multiple workstreams in bulk in Zendesk WFM.
  • Remember that activity is always tracked. Agent activity is tracked for every workstream, whether or not the agent is assigned or scheduled to it. See About the Agent activity page.

Tips for managing workstreams

Use these tips to keep workstreams accurate as your team and processes change:

  • Map general tasks or unified agent statuses to workstreams when needed. When agents are scheduled for work that isn’t directly ticket-related, but they’re still expected or allowed to open tickets, map a general task or unified agent status to workstreams. This way, agents can remain in that status and still be considered in adherence when they open a ticket from a mapped workstream. See Creating workstreams.
  • Use workstreams that don’t overlap. If a ticket matches multiple workstreams, you might see black activities on the Agent activity page. Inspect the ticket to understand which conditions are causing the overlap. See Monitoring agent activity.
  • Understand historical volume for your workstreams. See Exporting forecast data.
  • Revisit workstreams as your organization changes. You can refine workstreams at any time, but historical reporting uses the configuration that was active when the data occurred. See Editing workstreams.
  • Remember historical data doesn’t change. Later changes to workstreams, teams, assignments, and similar settings don’t rewrite past data. For example, if workstream A includes tickets for Group A until the last week and then changes to include tickets from Groups A and B, reporting for earlier periods still reflects only Group A tickets. The same is true for all WFM settings, including agents assigned to different teams. For example, if you remove a user from WFM, their historical data still appears in reports to preserve metric accuracy.
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