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.
💡 Fill shifts can be used in lots of ways. Use priority order to fine-tune your schedule.
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.
🚀 '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 ‘fill shifts’ 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.
💡 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. 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."
5. Review your activity
Take a look at your schedule preview to see how this activity is scheduled across different days.
When you’re happy, hit save!