What is Surfboard?
Surfboard is a Workforce Management (WFM) tool which helps contact centres to optimise their staffing by forecasting customer demand, scheduling shifts, and tracking real-time performance. It ensures agents are available at the right time and place to help customers, and hit targets, like SLAs.
Surfboard integrates data from various systems including time off, customer service platforms and meetings to provide one source of truth for how time is utilised in a contact centre.
What can Surfboard do for me?
Managing a customer support team is a complicated process involving multiple steps, people, tools and data sources. Surfboard streamlines these workflows, allowing you to forecast, schedule, track performance and monitor your entire function in one simple tool.
You can use Surfboard to:
Forecast each of your queues, inboxes or channels using your integrated systems
Understand the number of agents required to meet your targets and SLAs
Simplify and automate your scheduling process
Track performance across agents, teams and activities
Facilitate real-time management
View and export reports
Getting started
You can access a set-up checklist from inside the app by clicking the Surfboard logo in the top left corner of the page 💡
First, accept your invitation
You should find an invite to join Surfboard in your email inbox.
If it's not in your inbox or spam folder, just let us know and we'll send one over.
Click accept invite and log in for the first time.
Surfboard can be accessed through www.app.teamsurfboard.com - we recommend bookmarking this link 👌
1. Set-up forecast
Surfboard integrates with your existing customer service or CRM platforms to create forecasts based on your historic data.
Once connected, you can then create individual forecasts for each of your inboxes, channels or queues, allowing you to track volumes and receive staffing requirements for each.
2. Connect time off calendar
By syncing your team's HRIS or time off calendar into the schedule, you can:
Get full visibility over agent's time
Automatically plan around your agent's planned time off and absences.
Monitor shrinkage
Create accurate timesheets for all agents
3. Add team
If your team have not been uploaded already, now is the time to add your agents.
Agents need to be added into Surfboard so you can:
Schedule them
Track their performance data
Give them access to the tool
4. Create schedules
Now, your forecast is live, time off is synced and your team are added you can start to create demand-led schedules.
In Surfboard, schedules are created in two stages:
The shift schedule defines the days and times agents will come to work
The activity schedule defines the tasks and responsibilities that agents will do during their shifts.
Final step: Onboard your team
Once you've followed the steps listed above, your account will not be set-up and ready to go live!
The final step is to invite your agents to the platform so they can start following their schedules. We recommend sharing this getting started guide with your agents.
Get more from Surfboard
Track agent performance
Set-up performance to automatically monitor productivity and attendance across agents, teams and activities via your integrated customer service or CRM platforms.
Follow Playbooks
We've prepared Playbooks to help you get the most out of Surfboard. These guides highlight the tools you can use in Surfboard to support your use-cases.