Zendesk Talk: Allow Reporting on Agent Availability

Shawna,

I appreciate you chiming in here. As big of a problem it is that this functionality is not in the product nor has been delivered in the timeframes laid out, the bigger problem for many of us is the complete lack of response to our requests for updates.

If you read through the comments you'll see that time and again this community is ignored when asking a very valid question: could someone tell us what's going on?

I don't know if it is because nobody on the Zendesk Product team wants to take ownership, or if it's just a difficult question to answer, knowing that the community is upset but regardless of the reasoning the ending result is that you are perceived to be uncaring and apathetic to your customer base.

I'm sure that this has already cost Zendesk $$$ when it comes to renewals and it will cost them more as long as your company continues to ignore your customers.

Shawna,

My issue here is not the honesty of the team but the lack of having accurate timelines. If you stated in 2018 that this would take 5 years to develop and delivered on that plan, I don't think the community would have much frustration. The issue at hand is that your team is somehow promising releases before all of the testing is completed. This puts us in a bad situation with our stakeholders when we are relaying promises that are never kept. 

I don't know how you can now expect anyone to trust timelines of new feature releases. Going forward I will have to wait until the actual release date to start planning for new features rather than have time to prepare my team for them. Please ask the developers to only relay a new go-live expectation once testing is fully completed. Delivering is much more important than trying to appease the community with an earlier release date.

@shawna11,

Zendesk's "continued commitment to make sure we are staying on top of communication with our customers" has been slipping further and further lately. This specific thread is just one very blatant example where you can see the frustrations of several of your customers.

To stick to the topic for this thread:

1. What we are waiting for is a functionality which is at the very basic core of any CRM reporting tool.
2. There is, quite simply, no excuse for this functionality missing. The data used to be available until Zendesk made the concsious decision to remove it.
3. When re-introducing a very basic functionality has taken so far over 5 years since the first request, it is very difficult to trust any promises about it being even close to a priority. When Zendesk in addition then goes and makes the data available to customers by buying a 3rd party developer that hacked their way around it and make it available as a paid service, the sentiment and care for customers do not look very good.
4. After 2 years of "this quarter, no wait, it'll be next quarter, we promise maybe the next one" with zero updates every time the promised time passes, how does anyone at Zendesk respond with the line "Our intention here is to keep our customers updated to remain transparent and as honest as possible, not shy away from the truth about our timelines to deliver on our promises" and keep a straight face?

I fully understand that this is not in the control of anyone who has to deal with customers. But you as a company also have to understand that there is a limit to how many times customers can be flat out lied to without frustrations reaching a high level.

Hello everyone and thank you for your follow up on this post. Waiting on feature releases that get pushed out is understandably a frustrating experience. 

I have raised all of this feedback to product teams working on this feature, as well as our internal teams who I work with on customer communication around product feedback. Please know your experience in our community forums for product feedback is my #1 focus of my role here at Zendesk, and I appreciate you continuing to help keep us accountable for how we can better work together.

We are aware that there are opportunities for improvement in our communication around product releases and managing expectations. I understand how our recent updates about moving the timeline beyond the previously communicated might have caused frustration because we didn't reference our guidelines in this post. Roadmap timelines are always estimates and can change for various reasons. In this case, we identified a dependency that needed to be fixed before we could ship the feature. Going forward we will be sure to be more clear about timeline estimations and provide updates when changes to the timeline come up so as to avoid confusion in the future. 

Our product managers will chime in shortly to give more information about their current process and where they are headed to provide a bit more transparency. They will continue to update you and engage with the Community to foster helpful conversations. 

We value your feedback and business, and we look forward to our continued partnership.

Hi Everybody,

I apologize for the delays and communication gaps regarding the release of the Historical Agent Status Dashboards and the frustration this has caused. We acknowledge our failure to meet the promised timelines due to unforeseen development challenges.

I know it's not helpful to give you a timeline that we might not meet, so I won't do that. What I will do is to share more information about exactly where we are at in the planning/development process and where we are headed next.

First of all, this work is in progress and has already been prioritized. We are actively working on the ingestion of data for all accounts to prepare for the general availability launch. This is planned as a month of engineering work, and once completed, we will conduct readiness testing before the release. At that point, based on the outcome, we will take a go/no-go decision for the GA launch, currently slated for the end of January.

However, since we have encountered several issues due to the complexity of data ingestion, there is always the risk of discovering new issues while we work hard. So please consider these plans as indicative but not as strict commitments to the timelines.

I understand that delivering this feature is what is top of mind for you, and please know it is top of mind for us as well. We hope this information provides clarity into our process. We will update on this thread again once we make a decision on the GA activities; this should be before the end of January. Again, we appreciate your continued patience and support.

Hi Volkan, 

Appreciate the time you took to provide an update, it's never an easy thing to juggle dependency work vs release timeline vs risk of introduce new bugs.

Follow up question for you: 

Is all this work you mention all part of this TALK refactor that's ongoing right now? There's a number of what a lot of us in the community that are waiting for what can only be described as a Minimum Viable Product aka basic feature for a Phone system.

This thread is a very good example, another one is the ability of properly alert supervisors or team leads about specific Talk related events. For example if a user has been waiting in the queue for 4 minutes and your SLA calls for all calls to be answered within 5 minutes. At the 4 minutes mark you send an alert for a possible SLA breach. Stuff like this is just what a lot of us would consider basic functionality.

A lot of posts in the community for all sorts of the same thing that gravitates about this topic.

It would be tremendously helpful to have your insight or even better if you could provide us with a roadmap of your 2024 plan?

I get it things in the development cycle gets pushed back due to unforeseen things, you fix something in 1 part of code only to find out it breaks 6 other things. These things you guys can control but you can at least control your level of transparency on what your plan is.

What is the plan? What's the whole Talk overhaull plan for 2024?

Thanks you immensely for taking time in your busy days to "calm the masses" ;)

Hi Sam,

Thank you for your understanding. I'm always happy to help our customers in any way I can.

To maintain the transparency I promised, I'd like to clarify that the planned Agent Status dashboards are not part of the Voice roadmap, but rather they pertain to Omnichannel Agent Statuses across Zendesk channels. Therefore, I cannot directly answer your question, but I already informed our Community and the Voice Product Team about this so they can plan to provide more information about the Voice Roadmap.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions or feedback.

Hi @volkan,

I want also to share my experience here. Other products like Explore, Guide, AI, Answer Bots, and Support get regular updates and feature enhancements. Talk is one of Zendesk's most bad respect products. 

Messaging is not the only real-time channel Zendesk should take care of. Voice / Talk is also a real-time channel where a lot of functionality is lacking.
- This article request
- Ringtone through speaker external (not headset)
- Outbound Number per Number (not Global)
- Waiting TIme per Number (not global)
- Clone of Hotline Configs
- Better IVR management i.e. "grab a customer ID" (we need put in Twilio in between to achieve)
- Call Transcript (Multi-language)
- Integrated Call Picker often hang / stuck when click "Accept"
- AI and Text-to-Speach for Hotline announcements
- Live Dashboards in Explore didn´t support see the waiting queue it only show KPI with " 10 Calls Waiting" but no Drill In to know where such calls are waiting
- Omni Channel not supporting Calls (Voicemail, Callback, Abandoned Calls) to route to Agents

So whenever it comes to "Talk" this product self have less enhancements in past 5+ years and also other launches Omni Channel, Reporting only include the absolute minimum.

Thanks.

Tobias

Hi Tobias,

I really appreciate your detailed feedback. I have shared it with the Voice Product Team. I believe this information is very valuable.

Thanks,
Volkan

Thanks for the response Volkan, is the voice team planning on responding here in this community post or are they planning on putting the roadmap somewhere else on the website for us to to be better informed?

Thanks!

Hi Sam,

I know the community team is working on a plan for this. I'll let them clarify further.

Thanks,
Volkan

Thank you Zendesk team for giving this thread the time and attention it's been lacking for so long. I'm really happy to see ANY helpful attention on this. THANK YOU.

@shawna11 or @volkan Are either of you able to provide more details regarding what specific metrics will be available or plan to be available with this rollout? Or even better, provide us a 'field' list?

For example: Daily Time {Status}, Status Changed From/To, Time Changed, Changed by {user}, etc. I think I read we can not, but just for the sake of clarity, can we break the metrics down by product (Talk, Support, etc.)?

Leadership Use Case: Lets say I'd like to see how long a specific agent is 'Available' on Talk each day... Seems like a reasonable question to have. Is that something that will be easy to report on?

I'm sure all of us would greatly appreciate knowing whats to come! As many have mentioned, much of these metrics are pretty standard reporting and management needs for any organization leveraging ticketing and phone solutions.

Hi Sam & Tobias, 

Martin here from the Voice product team. Thank you for the feedback about the Talk/Voice product. We understand your frustration in relation to the feature gaps you outlined. A lot of the functionality mentioned is top of mind for us as we plan our roadmap for next year.  

We are in the final stages of our 2024 annual product planning process. Once this is completed we will have a better idea of the features we will work on in 2024. Stay tuned for more information. 

Thanks, 
Martin 

Hi all, thank you for your continued engagement on this thread. We value and appreciate the excitement around wanting to engage with our PM teams, who wouldn’t want to chat with them! I want to provide some more information to questions that have arisen here to help clarify our process and get some helpful information shared.

Tobias Hermanns - I want to call out that I saw your list of all of the improvements you would like to see with Talk and reporting capabilities. We appreciate your tenured engagement here in the community and the feedback you’ve provided over the years, it is valuable! In order to keep the conversation thread clear and focused on reporting on agent availability, we will not be responding to those additional individual requests here; some of them have existing feature request threads, and for the ones that do not, you are welcome to create new feature requests for those in the appropriate product feedback topics so that other community members can see and engage with your request. We want to keep this thread focused on the feature request at hand, reporting on agent availability. By posting individual requests in the appropriate discussion topics, we can ensure your ideas are visible and can be responded to appropriately. Here is the product feedback template to help get you started. Thank you!

Sam Goulet - thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here and your interest in learning more about Talk! I want to reiterate our previous sentiments of understanding how the communication on this particular feature request could have gone better, our awareness of how we can improve, and our commitment to improving going forward. However, I want to remind everyone that, as is stated in our Community Guidelines, we do not share roadmaps here in the community, and all projected delivery dates are subject to change without notice. If you are interested in learning more about the future of Zendesk products, please visit the  What’s New page which is updated on a monthly basis. We also host quarterly What’s New events you can learn more about in our announcements page here. 

Whitney Votaw - please review this documentation on our EAP here to help answer your questions. Please note this EAP is currently closed to allow GA launch activities for the start of next year.

Finally, we appreciate your cooperation in keeping this thread on the topic of the original request which is reporting on agent availability. If you have another piece of product feedback from our team about Talk, please make a new post in the appropriate product-specific feedback topic to share your insights, we DO want to hear from you! This way, other community members can engage with your feature request and our Product teams can more easily see your ideas. Going forward, we will not be responding to comments that do not pertain to the feature around reporting on agent availability in this thread.

Thank you all for continuing to engage here and for being valued Zendesk Community members. We look forward to having more information for you on the feature request.

Hello everyone! I am thrilled to be back with updated information on this feature request. We are excited to announce that this feature has now reached GA! See the announcement for more information. 

If you have any product feedback about this feature, or another area on Talk, we would love to hear from you! Please create a new post in our Talk forum using this template to share your thoughts; our product feedback team will log and review every piece of feedback that comes through.

If you need a reminder on how the Zendesk product feedback forums work, see our Community Guidelines. 

At this time we are going to close this post for comment. Thank you all again for your passion about this feature and for being valuable Zendesk customers.