Generating and publishing the schedule

After configuring your organization structure, you can generate a schedule based on your forecast. Your forecasted workload, combined with your organizational setup, allows you to automatically generate a detailed schedule complete with breaks, channel specific assignments, and more. 

Automatically generating the schedule based on your forecast helps you create better schedules. You can still manually edit your schedule as needed to further optimize your staffing requirements.

When you publish the schedule, agents see any change to their schedule on their Agent Schedule app in Zendesk. 

This article contains the following sections:

• Generating the schedule
• Publishing the schedule

Related articles

• About the Schedule page
• Editing your schedule

Generating the schedule

You must be an admin to generate the schedule. Generate the schedule for all agents in your account or choose to generate it for a single agent, by group, location, or team.

The schedule is generated based on the forecast. If there's no forecast for a workstream, then the schedule is baed on coverage and location requirements.

You can generate a schedule up to 90 days in the future.

Note: Your organization structure must be set up before you can generate a schedule.

To generate the schedule for all agents

1. Hover over the schedule icon in the navigation bar, then click Schedule.
   The schedule opens to the day view by default. 
2. Optionally, click the date menu to switch to the week or month view.  Or select a specific date or date range from the date picker.
   
3. Click Generate.
4. Select the date range for when you want a schedule to be created.
   
5. Click Run.
   The schedule beings to generate. Depending on how many agents you have, it may take a few minutes to complete.
   When the schedule generation is complete you'll see an assigned shift next to each agent. The shift contains the tasks they need to work on at a particular time as well as any general tasks configured in the shift layout. 
   Next, you must publish the schedule so that agents will see the updated schedule in their Agent schedule app in Zendesk.

Note: If a workstream doesn't have any data then the forecast will fail to generate. If the forecast fails to generate, a schedule can't be generated. If a workstream has data, but displays zero inbound volume when you're generating the schedule, then the automatic schedule will randomly assign a workstream to an agent.

To generate the schedule for a single agent, group, location, or team

You can also generate a shift for a single agent or for a group, location or team instead of generating a schedule for your entire roster. 

1. Hover over the schedule icon in the navigation bar, then click Schedule.
   The schedule opens to the day view by default. 
2. Hover over an agent, group, location, or team then click the plus sign (+) icon.
   

Publishing the schedule

After you've generated the schedule, you must publish it so that agents can see their schedule in the Agent Schedule app in Zendesk.

To publish the schedule

1. After generating the schedule, click Publish in the upper-right.
2. Select the Date range you want to publish the schedule for. You can publish your schedule up to 90 days in the future.
   
3. Click the Agents tab and select which agents to publish the schedule for. You can publish the schedule for all agents, individual agents, by group, team, or location.
   
4. Click Publish schedule.