Intraday scheduling or planning what your surfers should do during their shifts, is a vital part of support team scheduling.
Whether it's ensuring you have enough coverage to answer your customers' queries, covering your daily admin tasks or planning training and development time, you can do it within Surfboard.
You can schedule and fairly rotate time on different activities for your team by creating rules. You can create as many rules as your team need. Surfboard will then automatically schedule these activities for you once the Activity Plan is applied to the schedule.
How to schedule activities in Surfboard
Activities are best scheduled using Activity Plan rules. Activity Plans let you automate your scheduling using simple rules. There are two different activity scheduling methods within Surfboard:
Coverage - Select how many surfers are needed on the activity across different periods.
Fill shifts - Fill all available time in surfers' shifts.
Total hours - Select how long surfers should spend on the activity per day or per week.
Surfboard will then dynamically schedule these activities for your team based on your requirements, their skills and available time.
You can also choose to manually schedule activities directly in the schedule if you need to adapt on the fly. Read more about manual edits here.
Not sure what scheduling method is best for you? đ€
Read our guide on common scheduling use cases
Click here to find a list of common activity scheduling use cases, as well as tips on how to best configure them within Surfboard.
Planning for coverage đŹ
When scheduling live channels you need to make sure you have the right number of surfers available to serve your customers. This is referred to as 'coverage'.
The 'set number of surfers' scheduling method allows you to set the coverage you need on an activity. Surfboard will then fairly rotate scheduled time on this task to assigned surfers to maintain coverage.
đĄ Best for live channels or activities where you always need surfers to be available e.g. phones, live chat, or tickets with short SLAs.
1. Add an activity rule
Click 'add activity rule' from the toolbar on the left of your screen.
You'll now be taken to the activity rule form.
2. Choose or create an activity
Select the activity that you want to schedule. You can select an existing activity or create a new one.
đ When scheduling activities for coverage, there are 2 things that can make your scheduling more effective:
Link the activity to a ticket group: This means that the staffing for this activity can be tracked against your forecast. You can link a ticket group to a forecast when creating or editing an activity in the schedule toolbar.
âAssign activities to surfers as skills: When surfers are assigned activities as skills, you can better staff activities as you know you'll always have the right surfers on the right tasks. You can assign activities to surfers when creating or editing an activity in the schedule toolbar, or by visiting the surfers page.
3. Define how this activity should be scheduled
Select the âcoverageâ option to plan for coverage.
Choose when you need coverage on this activity: Select the days, time window and timezone that match the operating hours of this channel.
Specify your coverage: You can set coverage as granular or as broad as you need to, from every hour to all day long. You can add additional windows if your need different coverage on different days.
Choose how long surfers need on this activity: Adjust this based on how your team work best.
Unlimited: Surfboard can fill any and all available time in a surfer's shift with this activity.
Custom duration: Surfboard will only schedule this activity for a set duration of time We recommend using âshrink to coverâ to fill awkward gaps in the schedule, especially over lunches.
Filter surfers: By default, every surfer in the plan will be included in the rule. You can use filters to choose which surfers should be included in each rule. This allows you to create rules for different groups of surfers for different situations. Read more about how to use filters here.
đ If you've linked your activity to a ticket group, you can flip the toggle on the coverage bar to easily compare how many surfers youâre forecasted to need compared to the settings in your plan.
4. Review your coverage
Take a look at your schedule preview to see how this activity is scheduled across different days.
If you notice you have patches of low coverage, we recommend playing with the session length.
When youâre happy, hit save!
Planning to fill shifts đ
Often teams will have activities that surfers need to do all day; such as on-call, monitoring specialist inboxes or supporting junior surfers. Other teams may also have a 'fallback' or 'default' activity that surfers should spend any additional free time on, such as live chat.
The 'fill shifts' scheduling method allows you to easily fill time in surfer's shifts on a specific activity. You can also choose how many surfers you need on task, to further control how your team are scheduled.
1. Add an activity rule
Click 'add activity rule' from the toolbar on the left of your screen.
You'll now be taken to the activity rule form.
2. Choose or create an activity
Select the activity that you want to schedule. You can select an existing activity or create a new one.
đ 'Fill shift' activities can also be linked to ticket groups to track staffing using the coverage bar.
3. Define how this activity should be scheduled
Select the âfill shiftsâ option: This type of scheduling lets fill all available time in surfers' shifts.
Enter the number of surfers needed: You can choose to assign this task to everyone or enter a custom number of surfers.
Filter surfers: By default, every surfer in the plan will be included in the rule. You can use filters to choose which surfers should be included in each rule. This allows you to create rules for different groups of surfers for different situations. Read more about how to use filters here.
đĄ Tip: Select 'everyone' to use this activity as a fallback or filler activity. Then, set the priority to be lower than your other tasks. This will make sure that it's only real 'free time' that's being filled.
4. Review your activity
Take a look at your schedule preview to see how this activity is scheduled across different days.
When youâre happy, hit save!
Planning to meet a target time â±
Some activities need to be scheduled to achieve a target amount of time, for example, if your team need to do 3 hours of admin a day or if your surfers all need 1 hour of development time a week.
The 'set amount of time' scheduling method allows you to define how much time you need surfers to spend on an activity across days or weeks. You can also choose whether you want this time target to be applied to each surfer, or shared between a group of surfers.
đĄ Time per surfer is best for activities like development, training or personal tasks, whereas time shared between surfers is best for things like clearing backlogs, admin tasks or shared responsibilities.
1. Add an activity rule
Click 'add activity rule' from the toolbar on the left of your screen.
You'll now be taken to the activity rule form.
2. Choose or create an activity
Select the activity that you want to schedule. You can select an existing activity or create a new one.
đ 'Set amount of time' activities can also be linked to ticket groups to track staffing using the coverage bar.
3. Define how this activity should be scheduled
Select the âtotal hoursâ option: This type of scheduling lets us set a goal for individual or shared time spent on an activity
Enter the time target you have for this activity: You can set a target amount of time per day or per week.
Now, decide if you want this target to be set for each individual surfer or shared between surfers.
Choose how much time surfers need on this activity at a time: You can split the total time into smaller chunks, or schedule it all in one go. 'Shrink to fill' lets Surfboard fill awkward gaps in the schedule.
Choose how flexible or specific you need to be: If youâre flexible, Surfboard will try to fit slots of time in on this activity around everything else. If you need to be more specific, click 'add time'. You can then choose from the following options:
Between: select a window of time that this activity can happen within.
At: enter a specific start time for this activity, it will then be scheduled for the length of time you entered previously.
At start of a shift: the activity will be scheduled at the start of each selected surfer's shift, regardless of the start time.
The end of a shift: the activity will be scheduled at the end of each selected surfer's shift, regardless of the end time.
Filter surfers: By default, every surfer in the plan will be included in the rule. You can use filters to choose which surfers should be included in each rule. This allows you to create rules for different groups of surfers for different situations. Read more about how to use filters here.
đĄ Tip: Many teams use 'at start of shift' to give their surfer's time to go through their replies and personal inboxes when they begin work.
4. Review your activity
Take a look at your schedule preview to see how this activity is scheduled across different days.
When youâre happy, hit save!
Filtering surfers
By default, every surfer in the plan will be included in the rule. You can use filters to choose which surfers should be included in each rule. This allows you to create rules for different groups of surfers for different situations.
The filters you have available are:
Surfer - Include or exclude specific surfers
Surfer skill - Include or exclude surfers based on the skills they have
Shift - Include or exclude surfers based on the shift they have that day
Scheduled activities - Include or exclude surfers based on if they are scheduled or not scheduled on another activity.
e.g Include surfers who have not worked on the Priority calls activity
Shift length - Include or exclude surfers based on the length of their shift.
You also have the ability to use multiple filters within the same rule. This gives you a lot of flexibility over how activities are scheduled. For example you could say:
"include surfers who are skilled on Phones, not on the Evening shift and have not been scheduled on Chat."
Prioritising your rules đ
You can use the priority order of activities to control which activities you need to be scheduled and which ones can be sacrificed if time is tight.
To change the priority of an activity, select one from the list in your plan. Then, click on the three-dot button (...) and open the menu to the right of the activity and change the priority up or down.
Notice how the schedule preview changes?
Order your activities in priority order to make sure your most important tasks always get done.
â
We recommend putting live channels and time-sensitive activities at the top. If you want a fallback or âfillerâ activity, you can put that at the bottom of the list to fill any free time.