Per group/department scheduling
PlannedWe offer 24/7 service, and have two teams: one during office hours, and one outside office hours (nights and weekends).
Outside office hours we have one or two agents that answer our 24/7 help lines from home. There is no admin during these shifts. These agents go about their daily/nightly business, as call volume during these times is very low.
Sometimes a day team member forgets to log off properly, and remains online for the night or a whole weekend. Because we have no admin to keep an eye on things outside office hours, and call volume is quite low, this could go by unnoticed. It adds waiting time for our clients and ruins our SLA.
Of course an admin can check in during their own time, but that is not something we like to ask of them. More importantly, it should not have to be necessary in the first place.
One solution would be if Zendesk could implement Hunt Group routing for calls (meaning a call gets routed to all available agents simultaneously, so clients don't have to wait on agents that are not working), but there is already a years old topic on this and it seems Zendesk doesn't want to implement it.
So another solution would be a way to route calls to groups or departments based on schedule/time of day.
Chat does offer department-based scheduling, which works quite well for us. We can route chats to our day group during office hours, and to our night/weekend group outside office hours.
It would be great to have a similar option in Talk as well.
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Official comment
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the feedback. We understand the pain when agents forget to log-off leading to missed calls in night and over the weekend. We are actively scoping a solution where agents gets logged-off when inactivity or missed calls. No timelines on it yet, may probably be sometime next year.
For your use-case in the meantime, you call utilise the ability to set business hours per phone line and call overflow capabilities together. During the out of business hours, call can be overflowed to a night phone line having the night agents in a group. Here are more details on setting business hours. To note: call overflow may lead to additional charges per minute for the overflowed calls. More details here.
This is not the ideal solution but hope it helps in the meantime.
Thanks
Rohan
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Hi Rohan,
Thank you for your reply.
The automatic log-off on inactivity or missed calls could be an improvement, depending on what it will work like once it's become available.
The weird thing is that what your development team is working on apparently requires missed calls to work, when missed calls is precisely what we want to avoid. That is not exactly a solution.
What you propose for the meantime also does not work. We need the overflow for when our agents are occupied, also outside of office hours. To prevent missed calls the overflow must remain an actual overflow, not the first and final stop on the line.
I'm sorry to say we can't keep working with this frustratingly rudimentary call solution messing up our SLA until "probably sometime next year", which could just as well turn out to be 14 months from now, while you guys work on something that doesn't even really solve anything for us.
Thankfully there are call solutions from other parties that integrate with Zendesk, so we might find a proper solution that way.
Kind regards,
Ben
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