Managing a team of customer service agents can be a complicated task. When you have customer service agents across different time zones or countries the task becomes even more complex. The easiest way to manage a team with overlapping roles is to assign working shifts for each individual so you have adequate and even coverage for your business when it comes to customer service.
Shifts and Vacation Days allow you to seamlessly manage how staff members’ actual availability translate to Re:amaze responsibilities.
When agents have shifts and vacation days defined, Smart Assign will only consider a staff to be available for automatic assigning during their shifts and when they’re not on vacation. Smart Assign will not assign anything to agents if they’re not within a shift or on vacation.
When an agent has vacation days defined and they’re actually on vacation, Re:amaze Smart Assign will also automatically unassign that agent when a customer responds so other agents can be eligible for replies.
How do Shifts and Vacation Days work?
- Shifts are an internal tool and are not exposed to customers.
- Staff members responding to conversations outside of their Shifts will not have Response Times recorded for those responses.
- Smart Assign will not assign conversations to staff members who are outside of their shifts.
- Conversations reopening from an "On Hold" status will also become unassigned if the assigned staff is on a Vacation Day.
Adding Shifts & Vacation Days
Shifts allow you to manage your personal work hours and Vacation Days from your Staff Profile page. You can add Shifts and Vacation days by going to Settings > Personal Settings. This will take you to your "Profile" page. Scroll down to see the Shifts and Vacation Days sections.
- Click + Add Shifts to set the days and time of your shifts.
- Click + Add Vacation Days to select a single day, or a date range for your vacation days. Shifts are also available for Classic Chat, giving you the same control over agent availability and message routing as with modern chat. To enable this, simply click Apply this shift to Classic Chat.
Managing Shifts & Vacation Days
Managing Staff Shifts and Vacation Days can only be done if your staff permissions allow you to do so, or if you're the account admin. If you are unable to manage your shift or the shifts of your teammates, contact the account admin and confirm that the correct permissions are enabled:
Manage Personal Shifts: Allows you to manage and modify your own shifts
Manage Staff: Allows you to modify the shifts of your teammates. When this Permission is enabled "Manage Personal Shifts" will also be enabled by default.
Staff Report’s Average Response Times and Shifts/Vacation Days
When agents have shifts or vacation days defined, the staff report’s average response time will only be calculated for their activities within their shifts and when they’re not out on vacation.
If a staff agent chooses to reply to customers outside of their shift and vacation days, they’re welcome to do so. Re:amaze will attribute the response count to their individualized staff reporting. However, the response times for these conversations will not be recorded.