Plan shifts and staffing with workforce management | Help centre

Workforce management helps you have the right number of agents online at the right time. Open it from Reporting, Workforce. It has four tabs: Schedule, Time off, Forecast and Adherence.

Who can do what

Every agent sees their own shifts and adherence, and asks for time off.
Agents who can view reports also see the team’s schedule, forecast and adherence.
Workforce managers (admins, and roles that may manage groups or edit reports) create shifts, copy weeks, and approve or reject time off.

Schedule shifts

Open the Schedule tab and go to the week you want.
Choose an agent, the day, the start and end time, and the activity.
Choose Add shift.

The activity is Work, or a block on top of a work shift: Break, Meeting, Training or Other. An agent’s work shifts never overlap, and a shift is at most 16 hours. A shift that ends before it starts runs past midnight.

Times are shown in the account time zone.

To repeat a week, choose Copy to next week. Shifts that already exist are not copied twice, and times stay the same across daylight saving changes.

Time off

Agents ask for time off on the Time off tab, with a kind (vacation, sick leave, personal, training or other) and an optional note. A workforce manager approves or rejects the request. Managers can also add time off for an agent, which is approved at once.

If you connect Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, out-of-office events from agents’ work calendars show up on the schedule too.

Approved time off and calendar out-of-office are excused. They do not count as scheduled time for adherence or staffing.

Forecast and staffing

The Forecast tab predicts how many tickets arrive per channel and hour, based on the same weekday and hour in the last weeks. The most recent week weighs most.

You set:

First day and number of days to forecast;
Weeks of history to learn from;
Handle time in minutes per ticket;
Target occupancy, the share of time agents are busy.

For each hour you see the expected tickets, the agents needed, the agents scheduled and the coverage. Hours with too few agents are flagged. The page also says how far off the forecast was last week.

Adherence

The Adherence tab shows, per agent:

Scheduled: work time, without breaks and excused absence;
Online when scheduled: time online during that work;
Adherence: online when scheduled, as a share of scheduled time;
Conformance: all time online, as a share of scheduled time.

Online time comes from the agent’s status. When an agent’s laptop closes, the online stretch ends at the last sign of activity. Only time up to now is measured.

In reports

The report builder has a Workforce dataset with scheduled time, online time in shifts and adherence, by agent, activity, date and hour. See Build a custom report.