Zendesk Talk: Allow Reporting on Agent Availability

Hi Everybody,

I apologize for the delays and communication gaps regarding the release of the Historical Agent Status Dashboards and the frustration this has caused. We acknowledge our failure to meet the promised timelines due to unforeseen development challenges.

I know it's not helpful to give you a timeline that we might not meet, so I won't do that. What I will do is to share more information about exactly where we are at in the planning/development process and where we are headed next.

First of all, this work is in progress and has already been prioritized. We are actively working on the ingestion of data for all accounts to prepare for the general availability launch. This is planned as a month of engineering work, and once completed, we will conduct readiness testing before the release. At that point, based on the outcome, we will take a go/no-go decision for the GA launch, currently slated for the end of January.

However, since we have encountered several issues due to the complexity of data ingestion, there is always the risk of discovering new issues while we work hard. So please consider these plans as indicative but not as strict commitments to the timelines.

I understand that delivering this feature is what is top of mind for you, and please know it is top of mind for us as well. We hope this information provides clarity into our process. We will update on this thread again once we make a decision on the GA activities; this should be before the end of January. Again, we appreciate your continued patience and support.

Hello everyone and thank you for your follow up on this post. Waiting on feature releases that get pushed out is understandably a frustrating experience. 

I have raised all of this feedback to product teams working on this feature, as well as our internal teams who I work with on customer communication around product feedback. Please know your experience in our community forums for product feedback is my #1 focus of my role here at Zendesk, and I appreciate you continuing to help keep us accountable for how we can better work together.

We are aware that there are opportunities for improvement in our communication around product releases and managing expectations. I understand how our recent updates about moving the timeline beyond the previously communicated might have caused frustration because we didn't reference our guidelines in this post. Roadmap timelines are always estimates and can change for various reasons. In this case, we identified a dependency that needed to be fixed before we could ship the feature. Going forward we will be sure to be more clear about timeline estimations and provide updates when changes to the timeline come up so as to avoid confusion in the future. 

Our product managers will chime in shortly to give more information about their current process and where they are headed to provide a bit more transparency. They will continue to update you and engage with the Community to foster helpful conversations. 

We value your feedback and business, and we look forward to our continued partnership.

Shawna James,

Zendesk's "continued commitment to make sure we are staying on top of communication with our customers" has been slipping further and further lately. This specific thread is just one very blatant example where you can see the frustrations of several of your customers.

To stick to the topic for this thread:

1. What we are waiting for is a functionality which is at the very basic core of any CRM reporting tool.
2. There is, quite simply, no excuse for this functionality missing. The data used to be available until Zendesk made the concsious decision to remove it.
3. When re-introducing a very basic functionality has taken so far over 5 years since the first request, it is very difficult to trust any promises about it being even close to a priority. When Zendesk in addition then goes and makes the data available to customers by buying a 3rd party developer that hacked their way around it and make it available as a paid service, the sentiment and care for customers do not look very good.
4. After 2 years of "this quarter, no wait, it'll be next quarter, we promise maybe the next one" with zero updates every time the promised time passes, how does anyone at Zendesk respond with the line "Our intention here is to keep our customers updated to remain transparent and as honest as possible, not shy away from the truth about our timelines to deliver on our promises" and keep a straight face?

I fully understand that this is not in the control of anyone who has to deal with customers. But you as a company also have to understand that there is a limit to how many times customers can be flat out lied to without frustrations reaching a high level.

Shawna,

My issue here is not the honesty of the team but the lack of having accurate timelines. If you stated in 2018 that this would take 5 years to develop and delivered on that plan, I don't think the community would have much frustration. The issue at hand is that your team is somehow promising releases before all of the testing is completed. This puts us in a bad situation with our stakeholders when we are relaying promises that are never kept. 

I don't know how you can now expect anyone to trust timelines of new feature releases. Going forward I will have to wait until the actual release date to start planning for new features rather than have time to prepare my team for them. Please ask the developers to only relay a new go-live expectation once testing is fully completed. Delivering is much more important than trying to appease the community with an earlier release date.

Shawna,

I appreciate you chiming in here. As big of a problem it is that this functionality is not in the product nor has been delivered in the timeframes laid out, the bigger problem for many of us is the complete lack of response to our requests for updates.

If you read through the comments you'll see that time and again this community is ignored when asking a very valid question: could someone tell us what's going on?

I don't know if it is because nobody on the Zendesk Product team wants to take ownership, or if it's just a difficult question to answer, knowing that the community is upset but regardless of the reasoning the ending result is that you are perceived to be uncaring and apathetic to your customer base.

I'm sure that this has already cost Zendesk $$$ when it comes to renewals and it will cost them more as long as your company continues to ignore your customers.

Hey Tom, I appreciate and understand your frustration. We acknowledge that this feature is both heavily requested and has been significantly delayed, there is no doubt about that. While internally we are confident in our ability to ship a fantastic product we are aware that the delays have caused, and continue to cause, lots of frustration.

Our intention here is to keep our customers updated to remain transparent and as honest as possible, not shy away from the truth about our timelines to deliver on our promises. I hope you can hear this as confirmation of our continued commitment to make sure we are staying on top of communication with our customers.

Again, I 100% understand your and others frustration here. We will continue to keep this thread updated until this product is launched to you. Thank you for being a valued member of our Community. 

So new ETA is now early Q1 2024.

That puts us on route for 2 years since the first time we were promised "next quarter".

Hi all, thank you for for your patience as we worked to get a response here. My name is Wojciech, I am a PM on the team working on this feature. Due to unforeseen bug errors in our rollout, we needed to extend our testing to December to make sure our features are working properly before we pass them off to you. While we understand the urgency of this feature being released, we also want to ensure we are not launching a feature without doing the quality testing necessary. Our new ETA is mid/end January 2024. This feature is still high priority for us and we will continue to work on it until it is released. Thank you for your understanding, we apologize for the delay, and look forward to getting this delivered to you ASAP.

We bought Tymeshift a year ago, and just canned it. Unless your agents are logging in and out each day, and only using zendesk and not accessing other apps - it won't really give you a straightforward picture of agent availability. I will say, that our onboarding experience into Tymeshift was good, so I feel confident it wasn't a configuration problem. We were waiting for them to release "multi-tasking" but after a year of waiting for it we took a different tactic and re-allocated the spend to something else.

Susana Zendesk bought Tymeshift, a paid product that has this functionality. So they would apparently rather that you pay for that, generate reports from Tymeshift and then use Excel to merge reports instead of providing basic reporting functionality in their own reporting tool.