Zendesk Talk: Allow Reporting on Agent Availability

Karen Hynes Baring in mind this thread is open 4 years and still no further clarity on when this will be available, I am looking at alternative suppliers. I do not fancy moving into yet another year without this very basic, standard metric reporting. One of your competitors has been in contact with me and they have this reporting functionality along with almost every other feature of Zendesk and then some, all for almost half the price of what we currently pay Zendesk. You're making this decision very easy. 

Sometimes I have doubts that we are living in 2023...

How you can imagine Customer Support software pretending to be "Champions of Customer Service" without basic reporting on what your employees are doing? 

Zendesk, 

You have to understand how difficult you make our lives at work with not delivering on your promises.

We as Zendesk administrators are the "face" of this product inside our companies, so to speak. Each and every internal stakeholder is requesting changes from us and is constantly asking for updates from us. We do not have control over the changes, so we are asking you. You promise something and we forward this promise to the stakeholders. Then they are coming back to us in a few months and we keep pushing the promised timeframe further and further, because you haven't delivered.

This is affecting OUR personal accountability in front of our managers and stakeholders and there is nothing WE can do, because of you as a company! It makes us look bad and our hands are tied.

At least do not promise something that you know are not going to deliver.

Regards,

Yanko Chakarov

Karen Hynes

Thanks for the update!

While telling us it's a priority is great and I'm certain you're being truthful with what you're told by the Zendesk Development team, I think we're all looking for something more concrete and specific (or at the very least, that you'll update us more frequently along the way and respond to our questions). We're looking for Zendesk accountability. While the lack of these reporting metrics are a certainly a tremendous void for us, our growing frustration is beginning to come equally from the lack of follow up from the Zendesk Team in regards to it's release. We need the feature, but if you can't commit on the feature, can you at least commit to a set communication schedule on this post (such as once weekly/bi-weekly) regarding it's detailed status?

Something along the lines of "We're aiming for release by February15th, but I will update you once weekly with the status!" Providing us a status (such as 'on track', 'at risk' and/or 'expected to be pushed' (and providing us with a new target date) would be hugely appreciated by everyone and at least allow us to plan, prepare and take this info to those who we may report to (as Jay McCormack mentioned).

Jay McCormack, I share the same struggle. Upgrading an account when I've reported missing some basic functionalities for months now. I have a new Account Manager and plan to bring this up next week but I've done so in the past with no luck or true focus on Zendesk Talk functionality. 

Karen Hynes I appreciate the update but I think we would all appreciate a more timely, regular status update on this sort of issue. As important as this functionality is for you it means far more to us. I, for instance, based upon the promise of a Q4 delivery, made plans and made promises to my boss to be able to track this information more closely and to report it back to our executive staff. I now have to go back to them and reneg on this. It would've been an easier pill to swallow had someone from Zendesk chose to update us in a more real time manner.

"Set Expectations/Meet Expectations" is my mantra and that of many other Support Managers that I talk to. It is not asking a lot to expect (ironically) the vendor of our incident tracking system to do the same. I'm sure that Zendesk knew some time ago that the Q4 deadline wasn't going to be made but still chose to keep silent to all the inquiries .

I'm meeting next week with my Zendesk account manager. The plan was to move our 50+ licenses from Professional to Enterprise. I will have a hard time making this business case to my executive staff as I also deliver the message that this most basic reporting functionality that was promised to us in Q3, then Q4 has been downgraded to TBD. 

Karen Hynes You have not answered the question being asked over and over again here. What is the timeline? Do you understand that this reporting not being available, affects the customer's ability to report to their own stakesholders? Do you understand that we have to keep telling our organizations "So sorry I know we said we'd have this, but Zendesk has not released it again despite the promises we mentioned them making to release it by now, last meeting." Please, tell us the updated timeline. 

Also - Are you going to be refunding any of your customers for not having provided any accurate chat reporting for over 2 years on the product now?

Hi all, 

I want to provide an update to let you know that this feature is still a high priority for our team and it has been the top priority since we started working on it's development. Unfortunately, we have come across a number of obstacles along the way and as a result I regret that we have had to delay our timelines. Please be assured, this is not from a lack of effort from our teams. We are working constantly on this feature and we aim to release this once we have all the blockers ironed out. 

I want to reiterate that this has not and will not drop priority. I really appreciate this is a pressing feature for your teams and we are working extremely hard to meet this need. This is a high priority roadmap item that is currently under bug fixing and we will announce an EAP launch date once that is complete.

Thank you all for your cooperation and all the feedback.

Karen

This is arguably one of the most important metrics for basic monitoring, when are we going to get more information and less empty promises?

If it's not a priority for your team for some strange reason then at least tell us. 

When is this critical (for efficiency) functionality will be released? seems very basic