You can use the Time Tracking app to monitor how much time agents spend on tickets. Once you've set up the Time Tracking app, you'll find instructions for using it at Using the Time Tracking app.
If you're looking for help using Zendesk Explore to generate reports about your time tracking, see Time Tracking app: metrics you need to be measuring.
Note: If you originally installed the private Time Tracking app from Zendesk Labs, installing the public version of the app from the Marketplace will reset your time tracking data, and you'll lose any data previously collected.
Installing and configuring the Time Tracking app
You can download and install the Time Tracking app from the Zendesk Marketplace.
To install the Time Tracking app
- Click the Admin (
) icon in the sidebar, then select Apps > Marketplace.
- Find the Time Tracking app, then click the title.
- On the app details page, click Install.
- From the drop-down, choose the account you want to install the app to, then click Install.
- On the app settings page, configure any settings you want as described below. You can
return to this settings page at any time by clicking Apps > Manage > Time
Tracking:
- Title: Displays the name of the app. You can edit this to be any name you want.
-
Display timelogs to agents: Determines if agents can see a log of time spent
on that ticket so far, including the agent and status for each time interval.
- Hide the app from agents: Only displays the app to agents with the admin role. If the app is hidden, agents without the admin role cannot see or edit the timer.
- Auto pause: Automatically pauses the timer when the agent navigates away from the ticket, such as by switching to another tab. The timer resumes automatically when the agent navigates back to the ticket.
- Display timer controls: Determines whether agents see the play and pause buttons next to the timer, allowing them to manually control when the timer starts and stops.
- Reset current time: Determines whether agents can see the refresh button next to the timer, allowing them to start the timer over.
- Resume on changes: When changes are made to any fields, the agent will be asked if the timer should be resumed.
-
Edit time submission: When you enable this setting, the window below appears
when an agent submits a ticket. Agents can review and edit their time spent on a
ticket if, for example, they spent significant time discussing the issue with a
colleague outside of Zendesk.
Note
that this window does not appear for light
agents.
With this feature enabled, agents are required to confirm their time in order to submit the ticket. They have 15 seconds from when the window opens to cancel.
- Simplified time submission: Enables agents to be able to edit and submit their time spent in minutes, rather than in hours, minutes, and seconds. For example, with this setting enabled, an agent could enter "5" for five minutes. Without this setting enabled, the agent would have to enter it in the format "00:05:00". This setting only applies if you've also enabled the Edit time submission setting.
-
Enable role restrictions: Select which roles can use the Time Tracking app.
The app will not appear and will not track time for roles you don't select if you have
this setting enabled. Note: If you enable role restrictions, roles without access to the app will see the custom fields the app creates in their tickets. By design, roles with access to the app won't see the custom fields. For details, see Understanding Time Tracking custom ticket fields.
- Enable group restrictions: Enables you to select which groups have access to the app.
When you've finished configuring settings, click Update.
- If your Zendesk plan includes mutliple ticket forms, you'll need to update all of your forms to include to include two new custom ticket fields created by Time Tracking. For details, see the section below.
Understanding Time Tracking custom ticket fields
When you install Time Tracking, it automatically creates two custom ticket fields, Time
spent since last update and Total time spent. You can view the fields by
clicking the Admin () icon in the sidebar, then selecting Manage >
Ticket Fields.
By design, agents with access to the app won't see the custom fields on their tickets. If you enable role restrictions, roles that don't have access to the app will see the custom fields on their tickets.
If your Zendesk plan includes multiple ticket forms, you'll need to manually move the new fields to all of your ticket forms. If you don't add the new fields to all of your ticket forms, you will receive an error message, see Time Tracking app error message in Support tech notes.
To add the custom fields to your ticket forms
- Click Admin (
), then select Manage > Ticket Forms.
- Click the name of a ticket form to open it.
- Drag the Time spent since last update and Total time spent fields from the
list on the right onto your ticket form.
For more information, see Creating ticket forms to support multiple request types.
65 Comments
We recently started using the Time tracking app and decided to use the "edit time submission" function.
Only a few groups of our agents need to register their time. They really love this feature.
The others however find it annoying to see the prompt after every update.
Is there any way to select which (group of) agents get the "edit time submission" prompt?
thanks!
Regards
Bart
+1 to above, also the time limit of 15 sec is regarded to short by a great deal of agents.
Can I edit the two field titles? I have "Hide the app from agents" checked, but they will still see that time is being tracked when they select "Show all events" and see the two ticket fields:
Hello Toan!
Unfortunately there is not a way to rename them as they are system fields. I'm so sorry about that!
So this is not working for us. We installed it and it the two fields that were created were added to all of our forms and it should work. This however does not work. All we see is ..
Did you follow the installation instructions for this app and configure both required ticket fields to appear on every ticket form?
The answer is yes and I have checked every form we have including the inactive ones just in case. I have uninstalled it and reinstalled it with no success.
I did install it on our sandbox and it works just as it should right after installation. So something is different between our live and sandbox pages. Does anyone have any idea what it would be?
@Ed - I'm going to spin up a ticket for you so we can take a look at this directly. This isn't typically an issue with the time tracking app so I want to take a look. Look for an email from me shortly. Cheers!
This has been working for us for a long time and all of a sudden stopped working recently. Cant figure out why.
Hey Wynne!
Can you give more information about what exactly stopped working? That'll help with troubleshooting.
Jessie,
I found the problem, we added ticket forms and the hidden fields were not available on the form. Thanks!
Hey Wynne, I'm glad you got it figured out!
Hi, does the app capture time on all screens/programs within Zendesk, or just tickets? Meaning, will the time spent on Views, home screen, etc also captured?
Hey Teena!
The app specifically tracks how long an agent spends on a ticket. Whether that time will include time spent outside of that ticket will depend on whether you enable auto-pause or not. But ultimately, this app doesn't track everything your agent does in the agent interface, just the time they spend on tickets.
I was able to installed it successfully, also updated my forms, for some reason I am still getting:
Did you follow the installation instructions for this app and configure both required ticket fields to appear on every ticket form?
If not, please see these instructions and go to your ticket forms management page to finalize the setup.
---- Can I get some help.
Thanks.
Hey Hugo,
The most likely cause for this error is that you haven't added the two custom fields created by the app into each of your active ticket forms:
Total time spent (sec)
Time spent last update (sec)
I'll go ahead and send you a followup ticket so we can look at your specific setup more closely. I'll be in touch shortly!
So just to confirm, those two fields have too be added into each ticket form? So if I have 20 forms, it goes in all 20?
I found this article, so this answers my question. It has to be added to all forms, in order for it to work.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005211787
Hi,
I can't find anywhere when the timer actually starts. If the Auto-Pause is off, will the timer start once a ticket is assigned to an agent or only when the assigned agent actually opens the ticket?
And what happens if 2 people look at the same ticket?
Thanks for some input!
Melanie
Hi Melanie! I'm not exactly sure what the answers to your questions are, but I'm looking into it!
Hey Melanie!
The Time Tracking App will start tracking time when the Agent opens the ticket in Zendesk. The Time Tracking App does not run outside of the apps panel on a ticket, so if the ticket is not open in a tab then the app will not be tracking time.
If you do not have auto-pause enabled then the time will continue counting up for as long as the ticket tab is open for.
If two people are looking at the same ticket the app will be running independently for each user. The time that would be submitted with a ticket update would be how long that specific Agent had the ticket open for.
Hi,
I can't see the timer but the settings seem OK.
Hey Uri!
I see that you were able to get assistance with this in a ticket; it sounds like there was a browser caching issue that was preventing the timer from displaying properly in your browser.
Let us know if you have any other problems!
Hi!
We might love using this feature...
Some questions:
Hey Wouter!
I'm not sure I understand you first question; I don't see that quote anywhere in the article. Can you point me to where you're looking in the article?
If you enable the auto pause feature, the time tracking on a ticket will pause when the agent navigates away from that ticket. So if your agents work on multiple tickets at the same time, I'd recommend enabling that feature.
The only way I can think to notify an admin when a ticket exceeds a certain number of hours would be to use a trigger, but the app uses numeric fields and you can only trigger on those fields if data is present or not present; you can't specify if the entry is over a certain number. I'd say that your best bet for this would be to look into SLAs.
I'm not sure if admins can change agent time entries, so I'm going to look into that for you.
Hello Wouter,
Unfortunately, admins cannot change agent time entries. Agents can adjust their times before submitting though as long as you have this setting active in the app configuration:
Once submitted though times cannot be edited. I apologize for that limitation.
Hey Wouter,
Can you tell me exactly what happens with the auto-pause? I need more information.
@Jessie: You can reproduce this like this:
You will now see that the timer is actively counting in both tickets.
Agents many times have ticket 1 open already on their screen and get a question via Skype from a colleague with a link to ticket 2. When they click the link from Skype, ticket 2 opens in a new browser tab - resulting in both ticket 1 and 2 to be actively counting.
Hey Wouter,
I'm not sure whether this is expected behavior or not, so I'm going to confirm this for you.
Hi Wouter!
This is expected behavior. The timer will start whenever a ticket is opened, regardless of whether there are other tickets open in the same Agent's interface.
The app allows you to edit time submission - if an Agent leaves a ticket open all day because they were working on other tickets, they can adjust the time that gets submitted when they finish working on the first ticket. This is covered in t he following article:
Using the Time Tracking app (Professional-and-Enterprise)
Please let me know if you have any further questions :)
there is a field in the settings: "debug_prevent_huge_times"
Hey Michel!
I'm not sure exactly what that means, so I'm going to see if someone can answer this for you!
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