The Time Tracking app enables you to monitor how much time you spend on tickets. You might see all or just some of the following options, depending on how your administrator has set up Time Tracking.
Every agent will have to do a one-time browser refresh to be able to see the Time Tracking app after it's installed.
The app must be installed and set up by an admin (see Setting up the Time Tracking app).
Making the Time Tracking app appear after installation
The first time you use Time Tracking, do a hard refresh on your browser for it to appear. You will only need to do this once.
To make the Time Tracking app visible
- Press Command + Shift + R (Mac) or Control + F5 (Windows) to refresh your browser cache.
Tracking your time spent on tickets
To pause and resume the timer
- Press pause and play to pause and resume the timer as needed, such as if you still have a ticket open but are taking a break to answer an unrelated phone call.
To reset the timer
- Press the refresh button to reset the timer to 0.
To review timelogs
- You can review how long different agents have spent on that ticket.
- When you submit a ticket, you might see a window like the following, which allows you to edit or confirm your time:
When the window appears, the timer on the Cancel button begins counting down from 15. If you don't click Cancel or Submit before the 15 seconds are up, it closes and an error message appears.
Reporting on Time Tracking in Explore
The Time Tracking app tracks the time spent on each ticket update and stores this with the ticket. With Explore, you can create calculated metrics that contain this information and use them to produce reports. To learn how to set up custom time tracking metrics and produce reports, see Time Tracking app: metrics you need to be measuring.
81 Comments
Thanks for the feedback, Wouter!
Hi everyone, I have two questions regarding Time Tracking app:
1) I think this is a dumb question but...where do I find the "Timelogs" view that I'm seeing in several screenshots in this thread???
2) How can I use this time data in a staffing model? What working rules should I implement on the team so that I know that the data that I have is useful?
If I'm trying to see if I need to hire more agents because they're not working enough during their shifts or because we don't have enough agents, how can I use the Time Tracking app and how should they be instructed to use it to make that assessment?
If they're looking at tickets but then moving onto the next one without doing anything that would be untracked time, the same as say time spent watching Youtube. Should I tell them that they must always submit an update to a ticket or their time will count as "goofing off" time? I don't know if such a rule would do more harm than good so I'm uncertain as to how useful it is and I'm interested to hear how other people use it.
Afternoon Rich,
1) The time logs can be found under the Time Tracking App by pressing on the grey arrow button:
2) You can use GoodData Metrics to be able to view the total time an agent has tracked against all tickets. I believe ZenDesk already has some default metrics for time tracking. We duplicated these metrics and created hours.
GoodData is really nifty, it just takes some time to understand. I have several reports which will show me how many hours an agent has committed to per week, month and YTD. All of this comes from this Time Tracking app.
In regards to untracked time, there are other apps such as Tymeshift that can actually track this. It really depends what the expectations for the staff are, if they are always meant to be working on emails and no other commitments then your option of 'goofing off' time would work. We have internal projects that we work on - for this work we track time against a ticket where the requester and all CC's are internal staff.
I hope this helps.
Thanks Kat, but I don't have that little arrow underneath "Total Time". Perhaps I have some other settings off that would need to be turned on to enable that. I'll play around with that some more.
I have created the insights reports using the recipes but I'm not sure how to use them to evaluate/manage agent performance, team productivity, or how to use the time tracking data in a staffing model.
I understand this is not a WFM application but for those of you using it to help inform staffing decisions, I would think that you have some working rules in place to make it so that the data you are capturing is meaningful and you know what it means. I think this is the sort of feedback I was hoping to get: How do your teams manage their tickets and conduct their day-to-day and how do you interpret the time tracking data within that context?
Ultimately, I think we will need Tymeshift because I'm particularly interested in tracking how much time people spend looking at tickets that they never act on. Which is explicitly something that the Time Tracking app doesn't do.
Hi All,
I have gone through all the tutorials and have not been able to find a way to do what I am trying to accomplish:
I need to see how much time my agent has logged in a given week and which tickets the time is on. Can anyone provide some advice/guidance.
Thanks!
Andrew
Hey Andrew,
Thanks for your question!
I think I have a resource that should give you what you're asking for:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203664236-Time-Tracking-recipe-The-metrics-you-need-to-be-measuring
That article tells you how to use the insights (or explore) reporting tool in tandem with the time tracker app to create reporting recipes to break down your data.
The steps in the article are primarily custom metric based, which is something unsupported by Zendesk, but the steps are thorough and should provide you with the know-how to get this up and running.
Hopefully that helps!
Has anyone else noticed the default behaviour for the Time Tracking popup has changed slightly in an update in recent months (maybe more)?
In older versions if you closed the ticket within a minute (short duration) I believe it would set the default value of time to 0 Zero minutes, making it very quick to click Submit/OK and not record any time logs.
This was useful as you open/close or browse through tickets skim reading things etc.
Now it appears the default lowest value is set to 1 one minute. This means most of the time I have to type Zero before submitting.
I have setup detailed reports for time logged against my customers to aid in tracking how many hours of their monthly pre-paid support they've used. So I am trying to be careful not to log any "billable" minutes when unnecessary.
Hopefully some of that made sense!
Dan
Hello, MiiiA,
There was indeed a change in the app's behaviour. Before it used to round down to 0 and now it rounds up to 1. Our engineers have changed this setting and it should be rounding down to 0 again.
Could you please clear the cache of your browser and try again?
Hi Ricardo,
Thanks for the update. I have refreshed the cache a few times and I'm still getting the rounding up to 1 scenario. Anything else I can try?
p.s. Something I think would be a great feature request is the ability to toggle/set some parameters for these options in the settings. I would also love to be able to default the rounding to the nearest 5 minute block. As I try to teach my agents to add time to the nearest 5mins, rather than entering 33mins, enter 30 or 35 etc.
Dan
Hello again! I have created a ticket on your behalf and sent you an email so we can troubleshoot your account. Would you be able to take a look at your inbox? :)
Thanks.
Hi all,
How do I remove time spent in the Solved Status when reporting on Avg time spent per ticket? My numbers are inflated because someone must have left their browser open and the clock just kept on ticking. :)
Thank you!
Jamie
Hi Jamie,
I sometimes add a NEGATIVE time record which for my custom reporting works OK as long as I catch it within the same Month/reporting period.
Not sure if that still works, or will work in your situation?
Dan
Can you report on the Time Tracking app through Explore rather than insights?
Hey Tara,
You should be able to report on time tracking metrics within Explore. We got some great documentation I recommend you take a look at here :) Time Tracking app: metrics you need to be measuring
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi,
Within the Time Tracking app is it possible to categorize the time spent on a particular activity?
For example: I spent x amount a time doing X. I spent x amount of time on Y.
Thank
Hi Renee -
There is not a way to categorize time spent within the Time Tracking app. The only way to differentiate time spent is between different agents submitting on the same ticket.
Hello,
We realised recently that the counter doesn't pause if a Specialist navigates away from the ticket - to answer a call, jump into another tab or window etc. When exactly does the counter pause automatically, if at all?
We don't have the app visible to agents to 1. keep their apps view relatively clean and 2. so that there can be no manual adjustment of logs.
Thanks,
Lisa
Hello again Lisa! Brett (ZD) found this article which describes the behavior:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041440394
(be sure to follow the link in the article to see the difference between ticket tabs and browser tabs)
Hello again Jonathan! I seem to be taking quite a bit of your time lately. Thanks a lot for surfacing this - I'cve added a comment to an article within. Thanks again!
Hello,
I've been having a look on a number of articles related to the Time Tracking app and I've not be able to find an article that explains how the app works.
When does the time start, is it when someone goes into a ticket and when does the time stop? ( I believe the time stops when they press the submit button)
We currently do not assign tickets to individuals, they are assigned to groups and advisors use the play button to have tickets pushed to them? - Will the time track app know which advisor has updated the ticket without it being assigned to them? - I don't think this will be an issue when solving the ticket as an advisor needs to be assigned in order to solve the ticket.
Currently we do not have Explore, we use a third part system to store our data from Zendesk and we use Looker to visualize the data in dashboards - does anyone have experience with using the time track app with this?
thanks, Kaan
Hey Kaan,
Great question!
The time tracking app will start tracking time as soon as an agent opens the ticket. The time will then be paused once an agent navigates away from the ticket to another ticket in your Support interface.
That being said, if an agent navigates to a different browser tab, the clock will continue tracking in the ticket.
The time tracked is applied to the ticket and not the individual agent so there shouldn't be an issue there with not assigning the tickets.
As for your last question, I don't have any experience with Looker but perhaps someone else can jump in and offer up some advice.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
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