Shifts
Re:amaze offers Shifts in the Plus plan. Shifts allow you to manage your personal work hours and Vacation Days from your Staff Profile page. Shifts are used in two ways:
- Users outside of their Shifts will not be eligible for Smart Assign
- Users responding to conversations outside of their Shifts will not have Response Times recorded for those responses.
Additionally, (by default) if any new messages arrive on conversations assigned to a user during a Vacation Day the conversation will become unassigned so that it goes into an Awaiting status for visibility to other team members. Conversations reopening from an On Hold status will also become unassigned if the assigneed staff is on a Vacation Day. You can further change this by changing the "Shift & Vacation Unassign" preference to include Off Shift Hours as well.
Shifts are an internal tool and are not exposed to customers. If you'd like to set business Office Hours, they should be set independently from Shifts.
How It Works
Managing a team of customer service agents can be a complicated task for managers. When you have customer service agents across different time zones or countries the task becomes even more complex.
The easiest way to manage personnel with overlapping roles and time zones has been to assign working shifts for each individual so you have adequate and even coverage for your business when it comes to customer service.
When you’re using a powerful platform like Re:amaze, it’s therefore important to be able to mirror these working shifts as well. For example, you might have 10 different staff agents where 5 agents are working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between 9am and 5pm and another 5 agents working Tuesday and Thursday between 9am and 5pm, you should be able to map these hours in Re:amaze as well.
Re:amaze Shifts and Vacation Days allows you to seamlessly manage how staff members’ actual availability translate to Re:amaze responsibilities.
Re:amaze Shifts and Vacation Days can be added and managed under “Staff” settings.
You can add different shifts for different individuals that cover different hours throughout the week.
Vacation days can also be added per individual.
Personal shifts and vacation days work hand-in-hand with individualized staff reporting as well as Smart Assign.
Important Things to be Aware of
With the introduction of Shifts, Re:amaze now has two features related to “working hours”. The first is Office Hours. The second is Shifts.
Office Hours is an external facing feature designed to inform your customers of when you’re in and out of office. It does not impact shifts in any way.
Conversely, Shifts is an internal facing feature designed to more accurately measure staff response times in staff reports and their availability for Smart Assign.
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.
Smart Assign and Shifts/Vacation Days
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.
Roles and Permissions and Shifts/Vacation Days
Managing Staff Shifts and Vacation Days can only be done when a staff member has access to the permission setting under their role.