Seeing live agent status and activities

Using live dashboards in Explore, you can see which agents are online and which open tickets, chats, conversations, and calls they’re assigned to. This real-time capacity reporting helps supervisors balance availability and workloads across teams, as well as monitor individual agent performance, all from a central dashboard.

The instructions in this article work for the prebuilt live dashboard as well as any live dashboards built in the beta dashboard builder that have reports with drill in enabled.

This article includes the following topics:

• Seeing which agents are online
• Seeing which open work items an agent is assigned

Seeing which agents are online

You can drill into a live dashboard to see which agents are online.

To see which agents are online

1. In Explore, click the Dashboard icon ().
2. Open a live dashboard.
3. (Optional) Filter the dashboard based on the specific groups or brands you want to see. You can choose up to five attribute values per filter.
4. Click any Agents online report (for Support, Messaging, Chat, or Talk) and select Drill in.

   

   An Agents online window opens and shows you which agents are online.

   

   Note: The Capacity in use column appears only if you’ve turned on omnichannel routing. See Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads for more information on setting agent capacity.
5. (Optional) Search for a specific agent in the search bar at the top. Use a caret (^) to specify that the agent's name must start with your exact search term. (For example, ^Alex will return "Alex Jensen," but not "Maria Alexander.")
6. (Optional) If you filtered the dashboard in step 3, you can use the Filter drop-down to switch between the filter values you selected before drilling in. In Support metrics, you can currently filter the drill in by group only, not brand.

   

Note: Currently, you can't drill into a live agent status metric if there are more than 500 agents in that status. Use dashboard filters to lower the number of agents that a live metric reflects. When you do, you'll be able to drill into the metric.

Important: To get the most value out of this dashboard, remind your agents to sign in and out of Zendesk to accurately represent their shifts. This is particularly important for the Support channel, where only two agent states are reported (Online and Offline). If agents don’t sign out, Explore will show them as always online. For more information, see Why does the Explore dashboard show too many online agents?

Seeing which open work items are assigned to an agent

After seeing which agents are online, you can select a specific agent to see which open work items are assigned to them.

To see which open work items are assigned to an agent

1. Open the list of online agents.
2. From the list, search for or select the agent you want to see work items for.

   The Agent work items window appears and shows the agent's overall status and status for each channel, along with details about the tickets, messaging conversations or chats, and calls the agent is working on.

   The Time in status shown is the time for the channel you selected when you first drilled in. For example, if you drilled into this screen from a Support metric, the time in status shown is the time active for the Support channel.

   

3. Select a work item to see more details.

   For each ticket, the window shows the following details:

   • Requester: The user who is asking for support through a ticket
   • Ticket ID: The unique ID number of the ticket
   • Status: What status the ticket is currently in (New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Closed)
   • Account name: The Zendesk account name (described in Branding the agent interface)
   • Date requested: The date the ticket was submitted
   • Priority: How urgent the ticket is
   • Group: What group the ticket is currently assigned to
   • Last updated: The date the ticket was last updated

   For each messaging conversation, the window shows the following details:

   • Requester: The name of the user the agent is messaging with
   • Ticket ID: The unique ID number of the ticket
   • Originating channel: The channel that the conversation started on. Possible values include Email and Messaging.
   • Duration: How long the agent has been working on the ongoing conversation

   For each chat, the window shows the following details:

   • Requester: The name of the user the agent is chatting with
   • Chat ID: The unique ID number of the chat
   • Originating channel: The channel that the message came from. Possible values include Facebook Messenger and Chat.
   • Duration: How long the chat has been active

   For each call, the window shows the following details:

   • Caller: The phone number of the caller
   • Call ID: The unique ID number of the ticket associated with the call
   • Call type: The type of call (described in Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Talk)
   • Duration: How long the call has been going on
4. (Optional) Use the Filter drop-down to select a channel and see only work items for that channel (Support, Chat, Talk, or Messaging).

If you’ve turned on omnichannel routing, the Agent work items window also shows the agent’s capacity underneath their status for each channel. See Creating capacity rules to balance agent workload for more information on setting agent capacity.