Team leads can easily collaborate to create their perfect schedules within Surfboard. This article gives you all of our top tips for a smooth experience 🤙
Do 👍
Create separate shift plans
When scheduling different teams, it's usually easiest to create your own shift plans. That way you're in control of your own team's time and contracted hours. The only time we'd recommend using the same shift plans for all teams is if you have an organisation-wide round robin.
💡 Select your own team when creating a shift plan
Create separate activity plans
Each team leader knows how their team works best, and is also most aware of their individual goals and targets. As a result, we recommend that each team creates their own activity plan.
💡 Select your own team when creating an activity plan
Only publish your own team's schedules
When publishing schedules, it's best to only publish your own team's. That way you don't share something that is still a work in progress, or not ready to share.
If any mistakes do happen, you can see who last published whose shifts by flipping to publish mode and clicking the 'last published' tag in the top right corner.
💡 Select your own team when publishing the schedule
Filter your schedule
If you want to focus on your own team, you can filter your schedule so you only see their schedules.
💡 Select your own team in the schedule filter on week or day view
Filter your coverage bar
When lots of teams apply their activity plans, you can end up with a lot of rows in your coverage bar - some of which may not be relevant to you. You can filter out these plans, and focus on your own team by using the filter.
💡 Hide other team's activity plans from your coverage bar
Take advantage of search and sort
If you work with teams around the world, it's likely you will have a lot of shift types in your account. This can sometimes make it tricky to find the shift you want. The good news is that we've implemented handy search bars and sort tools to make this faster for you.
💡 Search by shift name, time or timezone in the schedule or shift pattern builder
Use synced events
You can sync calendar events and meetings directly into your Surfboard schedule. This is great for visibility in your own team and with others. For example, if you have a weekly Customer Support town hall or a daily team stand-up.
Use Slack and/or Calendar export
Surfboard offers two great integrations to improve communication and visibility across your teams:
Surfboard's Slack app sends surfers notifications when they need to switch task or take a break. Surfers can also sync their Slack status emoji to Surfboard, to show their colleagues what they're working on.
Surfers can also export their Surfboard schedule to their external calendar using an iCal link. This gives visibility to everyone in the business.
Add some things directly into the schedule
For ad-hoc shifts or activities, it's sometimes best not to use a plan, and better to simply edit the schedule directly. We find this is very helpful when working with very flexible staff with outsourcers or freelancers.
Don't 👎
Edit plans at the same time
If more than one person edits a shift or activity plan at the same time, you can end up overwriting each other's work. If this does happen, Surfboard will show you an alert to let you know.
If you're making big changes to your shift or activity plans it's usually best to give any other managers in your team a heads-up first.
Edit settings for other teams
Many teams may have their own specific shifts, activities or ticket groups that they rely on day to day. As a rule of thumb, it's best not to edit these settings if you're unsure who uses them or who created them.
Enjoy surfing the waves of customer support together! 🏄