Generating and publishing your WFM schedule

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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 edit your schedule to optimize your staffing requirements further.

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:

• Understanding how the schedule is generated
• Generating the schedule
• Publishing the schedule

Related articles

• About the WFM Schedule page

Understanding how the schedule is generated

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

A schedule can’t be generated if the forecast fails to generate. For example, the forecast won’t generate if a workstream has no data.

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.

Generating the schedule

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

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. See Setting up your organization structure.

To generate the schedule for all agents

1. In the Zendesk WFM web app, hover over the schedule icon () in the navigation bar, then select Schedule.

   The schedule opens to the day view.

2. (Optional) 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, then click Run.

   

   The schedule begins 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.

   

   Agents’ shifts are highlighted and a yellow dot appears next to their names, indicating that the shifts are unpublished (see Distinguishing unpublished shifts).

   Next, you must publish the schedule so that agents will see the updated schedule in their Agent schedule app in Zendesk.

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

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

1. In the Zendesk WFM web app, hover over the schedule icon () in the navigation bar, then select Schedule.

   The schedule opens to the day view.

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.

Tip: Highlighted shifts that have a yellow dot next to an agent’s name are unpublished.

To publish the schedule

1. After generating the schedule, click Publish.
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.

Note: Currently, there is no specific limit on the maximum period for publishing schedules in the future. However, exceeding a two-year period may result in performance issues.