The News: Zendesk announced several enhancements to Tymeshift, the workforce management solution it acquired in June 2023, focused around helping organizations manage teams and workers more effectively and efficiently. The product improvements, which are now generally available, include faster schedule generation and editing capabilities, back-office activity tracking via a Chrome extension, the availability of workforce management APIs to exchange data, and the choice of up to nine forecasting algorithms to aid in planning. You can read more about the enhancements at the Zendesk blog post.
Zendesk Reveals Improvements to Tymedesk Workforce Management Solution
Analyst Take: Zendesk announced several functional updates to its Tymeshift workforce management platform, focused around helping organizations further streamline and improve the scheduling, tracking, and analysis of teams within organizations. These tools provide the needed flexibility and visibility that are increasingly required by large organizations and should help Zendesk further position itself as a strong WFM provider to mid-market and small enterprise companies.
The worldwide use of AI within employee experience software and services is projected by Futurum Intelligence to reach nearly $11 billion by 2027, with nearly $4.2 billion of that revenue coming from organizations in North America. Tymeshift, like other leading workforce management vendors in the market, is leveraging artificial intelligence to forecast workforce needs, based on both historical and real-time data.
New Features Enable Greater Accuracy, Efficiency, and Cost Savings
Leveraging data and analytics, Tymeshift provides a view of team performance and capacity, allowing managers to optimize staffing and manage costs, thereby improving worker productivity and satisfaction, while reducing agent churn. Tymeshift now supports more than 30 languages, providing teams around the globe with more localized options. Zendesk announced the following additional updates to the workforce platform.
Improved Agent Scheduling to Handle More Complex Workflows
One of the biggest friction points in contact centers is scheduling, both from an agent’s point of view as well as a managers who need to consider the growing desire for scheduling flexibility in addition to managing the ebbs and flows of volume. Zendesk announced that it has enhanced the ability of Tymeshift to leverage support ticket data and agent activities to automatically generate agent scheduling, making the tool suitable for larger businesses with more complex workflows. By using the bulk editing feature, managers can adjust, delete, or generate schedules, and managers can prioritize workstreams to ensure that priority work is addressed in cases of over or understaffing.
Capturing Non-Zendesk Work Activities via a Chrome Extension
Reporting remains a key driver of efficiency and effectiveness. However, previous versions of Tymeshift would not allow managers the ability to track their agents’ activities while working on tasks outside of Zendesk. The latest version of the software leverages a Chrome extension that allows the linking of URLs to general tasks, so that agents can be accurately tracked when working on tasks outside of Zendesk. This enhanced visibility of an agent’s full scope of activity throughout the day provides managers with a more complete understanding of how agents spend their time, enables opportunities for targeted training, and helps agents receive recognition for the work they perform outside of the Zendesk platform.
Creating Better Data Sharing via WFM APIs
Tymeshift also announced enhanced public APIs, which allows organizations to now integrate workforce management analytics with CRM, HR, and finance systems. This improved integration of data across various systems can help organizations optimize their processes and gain a more holistic view resulting in better operational efficiency, enhanced performance, and higher levels of team engagement. This capability is particularly important as organizations scale, and operate across multiple systems, divisions, or geographic regions, where data may not reside in a single location.
Leveraging Workflow and Process-Specific Algorithms for Greater Forecasting Flexibility
Workflow management and scheduling is not a one-size-fits-all task. As businesses deploy different types of workflows, processes, and types of employees, workforce patterns will vary. Now, as a result of enhancements to the product, businesses using Zendesk can now choose from nine differentiated algorithms, each tailored to specific business needs, instead of a single general algorithm. Each algorithm option has different logic for forecasting, and thus has different strengths for different types of support activity and work streams.
According to Zendesk, the best forecasting algorithm for each workstream is automatically selected by analyzing customers’ historical data, though the software will test all algorithms to determine which one will perform best for a given workstream. However, customers can also overwrite the automatic algorithm selection and choose any algorithm Tymeshift offers.
Integrating Data Is Paramount to Improving Efficiencies Within Growing Organizations
The incorporation of new tools within Tymeshift reflects the demand for tools that can handle increasingly complex work scenarios, which often arise as organizations expand. Many organizations have found that they added additional systems, geographic locations, and data sources that will impact the demand for human agents. Moreover, the growing integration of generative AI tools, which are changing the way agents are working, require ongoing monitoring and analysis to ensure that agents are properly supported, trained, and focused on the tasks that deliver the most value.
Tymeshift’s new product enhancements are designed to address the need for more granular visibility around agent tasks, as well as the realization that not all agent work will occur within the Zendesk platform. This approach will be valuable as Zendesk continues to make a push to move into larger mid-market organizations and enterprises, which, more often than not, utilize far more tools, systems, and processes to handle agent tasks and workflows.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
