Our event on August 29 focused on achieving customer service excellence through the integration of workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA). Participants heard from a panel of experts who shared practical tips and the latest innovations to improve support operations. The event was designed for both newcomers and experienced professionals, offering insights on optimizing workforce management and enhancing workflows. In this article, you'll find our event recording, Q&A highlights, and the event presentation, making it a useful resource for anyone looking to improve their customer service strategies.
Event Recording
Q&A Summary
Zendesk QA: In simple terms, Zendesk WFM and QA adjust exceptionally well with varying business sizes and customer service demands. Particularly with the QA component, the onboarding process is significantly expedited, which proves highly beneficial if your business experiences seasonal influxes. Moreover, it assists scaling businesses by ensuring seamless agent onboarding as your team grows. So both the WFM and QA elements of Zendesk are designed to adapt and grow with your business needs.
Zendesk WFM: Zendesk WFM is a tool that aids in planning, forecasting, and scheduling tasks by offering reliable data. A key feature is its automatic tracking of work hours, ensuring no work time is missed. This tool is beneficial for all team sizes, as it provides accurate data essential for team management. Zendesk WFM also leverages AI to anticipate future needs and discount irrelevant past events, facilitating effective staffing and schedule management. In a nutshell, Zendesk WFM helps make team management and planning simpler.
We consider customer satisfaction (CSAT) and our own performance metrics (KPIs) very important. CSAT helps to gauge customer happiness but it's not always reflective of an agent's performance.
So, we ensure that CSAT is aligned with quality scores, which helps distinguish between negative feedback caused by an agent's performance or due to other reasons such as product or process issues.
We measure agent quality scores in two ways: one is the 'Internal Quality Score' (IQS), giving a percentage score for each reviewed ticket and providing an aggregate score for each agent, team, or the whole department.
The second is the 'Auto QA Score' (AQS), which is assessed entirely by AI, providing a quick overview of all the tickets. This helps identify where human review is required.
In summary, we majorly focus on the IQS, AQS and CSAT to ensure quality and satisfaction in our services.
We recommend getting in touch with your account manager if you haven't done so already. We offer a 30-day trial so you can test it out and see the value it brings to your organization. Your account manager will be happy to assist you throughout this process. It's as simple as reaching out and giving it a try.
Resources: Getting started with Zendesk workforce management
We use two ways to fully automate your Quality Assurance (QA) process.
The first is Auto QA, where AI assesses your tickets based on standard categories like greeting, closure, spelling and grammar, empathy, and tone of the agent. This takes care of the 'soft skills' aspects, saving you the time of meticulously checking each ticket.
The second method involves manual focus on factors you particularly care about such as process adherence. We also use AI-powered spotlights, just like with VoiceQA, to identify tickets that might have sentiment extremes, churn risk, or display extraordinary agent performance.
Not only does Auto QA review your tickets automatically, it also helps you prioritize the tickets that need your manual review. This way, your time on ticket review becomes more efficient and impactful.
Getting teams involved requires a step-by-step approach:
1. Start with 'Performance Monitoring and Management'. Ask team members to log their tasks such as meetings or lunches. This minimal change helps collect useful activity data and familiarizes them with our productivity metrics.
2. Next, introduce 'Resource Planning' using Zendesk WFM. Here, team members will be able to view their schedules, request time-off, or even swap shifts directly from Zendesk Support. They'll also receive notifications about any schedule changes. For managers, this is the stage to create data-driven shift layouts and roll out weekly or monthly schedules.
By gradually adding elements ad helping teams familiarize themselves, we ensure smooth and engaging onboarding.
Yes. Manual QA is fully customisable. You can also choose which of our predefined Auto QA categories you would like to use, and some of these can be further tweaked as well - e.g. Spelling and Grammar, greetings, and closings.
Resources: Creating custom AutoQA categories
Yes. Our powerful AI filters help you find the important tickets to review, and then you can set these filters to be recurring review assignments that will randomly select tickets to review based on the criteria you set.
For QA and WFM all of your information is drawn directly from Zendesk into the individual platforms. You'll be able to then report based on the specifics of QA and WFM in each respective platform. At this time you can not see this information in Zendesk Explore but we are looking forward to integrating more closely in the future.
Besides having a clear insight into AHT and work completed - Zendesk WFM enables you to have a better insight into when your agents are actively working on a ticket vs when they're idle. Also, thanks to our point-oriented metrics, you're able to have a more in-depth productivity reporting in place by measuring more than just - how many tickets ended up being solved at the end? You're having an insight into their productivity during an entire ticket life cycle which reflects through having Handled, Escalated, Attended, or Bounce Points attributed.
Resources: Tracking agent time spent outside of Zendesk (EAP) , About workforce management dashboards
Sendle: "Easier to check attendance, but also real-time adherence, at a glance. I can see who’s working at any given time and adjust our staffing requirements"
Tembici: 75% Increase in agent efficiency, 80% Decrease in average resolution time, 30% Reduction in annual operational costs.
Link customer stories."
Resources: Sendle ups productivity with omnichannel CX and WFM tools, Tembici sees 30% cost savings with Zendesk WFM
Zendesk WFM is pretty versatile and not limited to customer-facing workflows. It works equally well for internal teams that use Zendesk to create tickets. With Zendesk WFM, you can track how much time is being spent on different aspects of your internal tasks, and understand productivity in real-time or historically. Essentially, whether it's customer-facing or internal tickets, Zendesk WFM treats them all the same, helping you manage your workflows efficiently.
Zendesk WFM helps you see real-time updates about your agents' work. Every 20-30 seconds, the system updates what ticket an agent is handling. You can sort these tickets according to the time spent, which is beneficial in monitoring work distribution. And if needed, you can directly access any ticket just by clicking on it from the report. So, Zendesk WFM keeps you connected with your team's workload in a practical and straightforward way.
Resources: About the Agent status page, About the Agent activity page
Organizational structure is completely independently approached and customized to support customers in building out different sites (Locations), teams, permissions and roles, work streams (lines of businesses/skills/buckets of work)
Resources: About WFM general tasks, Setting up locations and shifts in Zendesk WFM, Setting up teams in Zendesk WFM, Creating and editing workforce management dashboards, Managing user access in your WFM account, Managing WFM roles and permissions
For assistance with setup, we have several resources ready for you. Our Zendesk QA YouTube channel has numerous tutorials and expert interviews to guide you. When you sign up, you can check out our Zendesk QA help center that is packed with useful information. We also offer webinars and live setup sessions to assist you with onboarding. Moreover, we have a dedicated customer support team in place to ensure you're set up correctly right from the beginning. So, whether you're just exploring or ready to dive in, we have many resources to help you get the most out of these tools.
Resources: Zendesk QA Youtube, Using Zendesk QA, Contacting Zendesk Customer Support, Zendesk Workforce management (WFM) resources, Zendesk WFM (Tymeshift)
Note: Features & timelines are subject to change.
We've got a feature called 'acceptance rates' in our dashboards. It highlights when the AI score aligns with the human score, which is typically 95-96% of the time. While AI can make mistakes, just like humans, it's important to remember that AI errors may be different than human ones.
We understand the human tendency to be cautious about AI, and that's why we have embedded this data point in our dashboards. Our AI is consistently fine-tuned for accuracy. Seeing the high acceptance rate when you start using the product could be a persuasive indicator of its reliability. We’re always working towards making our AI more trustworthy for users.
In case agents work across multiple groups, WFM adapts flexibly depending on the level of detail you need. If they're working on different types of tickets, you can set up work streams for each category. This way, the agent activity screen will show changes as soon as an agent switches from one ticket type to another giving you real-time and historical data.
If you prefer to see when agents are handling tickets in general, no customization is needed. Importantly, this set up is fully automated for agents. They don't need to manually switch statuses when they change groups. It's all based on their actual clicks, making the process easy and efficient.
Timezones can be tailored to each location/site built in Zendesk WFM. This is useful for teams that operate globally, and it translates into having agents that belong to the specific site/location seeing the data in their own time zone, while WFM Admins can still view their schedules in their own default time zone. We also have a time zone switcher that can be utilized.
Resources: Using the WFM timezone switcher, Setting up locations and shifts in Zendesk WFM
Nope - we do see that teams get a hige amount of value from using both together, but you do not need to use WFM to use QA, and you dont need to use QA to use WFM - you only need to use Zendesk to use either or both.
We do! We have courses and demo videos available on the Zendesk QA Youtube channel.
Resources: Zendesk QA YouTube
Klaus - SOC-2 Type 2 yes, HiPAA we're working on as part of the integration with Zendesk.
WFM - Yes, SOC2 Type 2 compliant. not HIPAA compliant yet.
Depending on WFM goals and customer's current Zendesk environment, this is where implementation can be more or less extensive. As a benchmark based on our data and previous experience, most customers can get up and running within 4-6 weeks.
Agent Activity + Reports
Agent Activity - this is where we can identify short, alternating timesheets, with no productivity points shown below on the productivity bar.
Reports - with the use of our point-oriented metrics + Ticket Bounce Points + AHT (Agent Handle Time)
Resources: About the Agent activity page
Yes
We recommend playing with out powerful AI powered filters when you set up Klaus to find tickets that matter to you to review. Once you've found tickets, you can set up recurring assignments that will deliver randomly selected tickets that meet those criteria to each of your QA specialists to review.
Resources: Setting up autoscoring in Zendesk QA using AutoQA, Using Spotlight to filter conversations
Using Zendesk WFM effectively to enhance agent productivity starts with understanding your data - knowing where and how agents are spending their time. Viewing this data can be eye-opening and forms the basis for further improvements.
Having a tool like Zendesk WFM can help managers spot agents who are struggling in real-time, and offer immediate support, which can result in improved performance over time.
For admins and managers, enhancing productivity begins with tracking key metrics regularly. Thanks to detailed and customizable reports provided by Zendesk WFM, you can have a clear understanding of productivity trends and make necessary changes.
Moreover, a tool like this simplifies forecasting and scheduling tasks, freeing up more time for coaches and mentors, which ultimately leads to a more productive and efficient team. Looking at it from different angles really helps in maximizing the benefits of Zendesk WFM.
Not yet - this is something that is currently under development and should be launched pretty soon.
This functionality is currently in EAP. It should be available for every customer quite soon.
The productivity points will be calculated based on agent interaction. If an agent looks at a ticket but does not do anything, there will be no productivity points assigned. If they make internal changes but don't interact with the customer, for example, they will get an 'Attended Point'.
Resources: WFM custom report metrics
Event Resources
Event Presentation
Zendesk AI User Group
Event Recording
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