Question
On the State Detail tab of the Zendesk Omnichannel: Agent State and Activity dashboard, the Duration column shows a value greater than 24 hours, in a given state, for a single agent, on a single day. How is this possible?
Answer
You might see a state duration of longer than 24 hours for a single day when you apply a multi-day Time filter on the State Detail tab. The time filter applies to both the Start time and the End time of an agent state, which affects the data is included in the report.
To return the correct duration in the report, your report has to have the Start time and an End time associated with the change of state. If it doesn’t have both times, it can’t calculate the duration.
For example:
- If you apply a Time filter that excludes one of the times, the report will not return the duration.
- If you apply a Time filter that includes both times, the duration is returned and is reported on the date the start time occurred, even if the end time occurred on a different date. As a result, a multi-day state duration is reported on what looks like a single day.
A typical example
Consider the following example, also shown in the screenshot above:
- On May 14 at 10:09 PM, an agent goes offline and leaves for vacation.
- On May 24 at 2:50 PM, the agent returns from vacation and comes back online.
At the end of May, the agent supervisor opens the State Detail dashboard tab and applies a time filter for May 1 through May 31 to see data for the entire month. The supervisor then sees that on May 14, the agent has an offline duration of 232 hours.
This value is being returned because the agent entered the Offline status on May 14, and left the Offline status on May 24. Because the Time filter is set for the entire month of May, and because the Start time and End time associated with the state change occurred during the month of May, the report is able to calculate the Duration for the state. It then reports the state duration as occurring on May 14, the date of the start time.
Reporting on a single day
Conversely, if the supervisor were to filter the report to only a single day, May 14, the report would not return any information, including Duration, for the state change when the agent went offline at 10:09. This is because the end time associated with that state change didn’t occur during the time filter. As a result, the duration wouldn’t be returned because it can’t be calculated given the time filter.
To see a daily snapshot of the agent time spent in various states, use the Agent state daily dataset instead. For instructions on creating a daily state report, see this Explore recipe: Reporting on agent state.