Forecast adjustments
Group your incoming tickets and customise how they’re forecasted by adjusting handle time, response time, and SLA. You can also select between forecasting live (Erlang-C) or non-live (staggered model) channels.
We’ve heard that surfers use up to 8 systems at once to do their job, not to mention the sea of tabs that come with working on tickets. That’s why we’ve brought Surfboard into Slack. Your surfers are notified about their next activity ten and two minutes before they need to switch tasks, helping them avoid the need to constantly check their schedule.
Other team members will also be able to see what their teammates are working on through Slack status emojis, helping remote teams work closer together and improve visibility.
Easily manage the roles your team have within Surfboard and ensure your team have the right access to the tools they need.
Your team can log into Surfboard with email and password, or make it quick and simple with Google SSO.
We want your surfers to enjoy Surfboard just as much as you. With a dedicated login, your team can easily see their shifts and activities on desktop or mobile.
Whether you’re grouping by location, or by company structure, teams allow you to quickly and easily plan your teams in a way that matches how you work.
Remote and international teams are more common than ever, and scheduling across time zones is no easy feat. Our easy-to-use timezone tools are available throughout the Surfboard app, allowing you to specify time zone when adding surfers to Surfboard, or when planning shifts and activities. You can also easily view your schedule in any timezone you like, whilst easily seeing how far ahead or behind your surfers are based on their location.
Your surfers aren’t robots, and sometimes things change. Whether they’re staying on a call to help a customer, or need to start and finish early to make it to some Friday night plans, your surfers can easily clock in and out of shifts and breaks to notify you of these changes. Your team can clock in and out from the app, or from Slack with our Surfboard Slack App.
View and download timesheets for your team, combining what was scheduled with what surfers actually reported; giving you one, simple consolidated view of your team’s time.
Automatically consider shrinkage, occupancy, and productivity in your forecasts to output staffing requirements that optimise your team and keep burnout at bay.
Group your incoming tickets and customise how they’re forecasted by adjusting handle time, response time, and SLA. You can also select between forecasting live (Erlang-C) or non-live (staggered model) channels.
Group your incoming tickets and customise how they’re forecasted by adjusting handle time, response time, and SLA. You can also select between forecasting live (Erlang-C) or non-live (staggered model) channels.
Group your incoming tickets however you like using the ticket identifiers you’re familiar with in your platform. Keep it simple by simply selecting already created views in Zendesk, or get creative and combine tickets from multiple platforms. Don’t adjust how your existing systems are set up for another WFM software, Surfboard already works the way you do.
Don’t cloud your forecasts with out-of-date data. Stay on trend and accurate with focused forecasts based on 3 months of up-to-date and relevant data.
We sync all of your historical ticket data when you connect a platform to Surfboard. See all of your ticket data for all platforms in Surfboard to get a clear picture of where your team have been, and where they’re going. Easily compare different parts of your forecast and historical data, so you can visualise how your inflow has changed and will change over time.
We know how important it is to be able to plan your team in one place. Surfboard doesn’t limit how many integrations you have.
We currently integrate with Zendesk, Aircall, Twilio, Intercom, Dixa, Kustomer, Front, and Salesforce.
Working on another ticket platform? We’re always looking to integrate with new platforms. Get in touch and let us know which platform you’re using.
We know your surfers are multitasking superheroes – whether that’s monitoring phones and email at the same time, or your multilingual superstars taking calls in multiple languages. You can add up to three concurrent activities within Surfboard to ensure your team know exactly what they need to be doing, and when.
Just like Shifts, Draft & Publish for activities allows you to plan and edit in peace without disrupting your team. When you’re ready to share your schedule with your surfers, select the dates you want to publish, and instantly share them at the click of a button.
Getting a schedule from 0 to 100 is quick and simple in Surfboard with our intuitive Activity Plans, and making edits is just as easy. Right click on any activity to switch it, change it’s length, or delete it. When you’re switching activity, we’ll show you which activities the selected surfer is skilled in, as well as the ones they’re not.
Activity Plans are perfect for planning live channels, where coverage is key. You can create coverage rules for each of your activities, so you can ensure you have the right number of surfers online to meet the inflow patterns of your customers across different times, days and weeks.
Using your connected ticketing platforms, Surfboard will guide you to help you plan the right level of coverage for each of your activities, while still giving you total control over the level of coverage you want to set for your team, down to every 30 minutes of the day.
Scheduling doesn’t start and end with live channels. Whether it’s admin, refunds, or personal development time, making sure that it’s all scheduled is difficult to manage. You can create time rules to account for and plan these activities.
Surfboard’s flexible time rules let you choose between individual allocations or shared time as well as per day or per week options too. So you can schedule an hour a week of training for each of your surfers, while fairly sharing time on admin every day. Surfboard will automatically look for gaps in the schedule to schedule these activities, but you can also add specific time windows for more time-sensitive tasks.
Giving your surfers 30 minutes at the start of their shift is a great way to ensure your team are always set up for success. Getting this in your schedule is easy with Surfboard, even if your surfers have varying shift times. The at start of shift option allows you to assign an activity at the start of whatever shift your surfers are assigned. And yes, there’s an at end of shift option too.
Whether you’re dealing with the complexity of scheduling channels in multiple languages, or simply have a large variety of skills, Surfboard can help. Set up your schedule to only assign activities to surfers that have been assigned the right skills in their profile so that you’ll always have the right surfers on the right activities.
Bring your calendar events into Surfboard to make intraday scheduling even easier. Take control by picking and choosing which meetings you’d like to include, and get your team involved by letting them import their own meetings.
We know that fairness means a lot to teams, and managers spend a lot of their time trying to create equity in their scheduling. Surfboard does this work for you. When assigning activities, Surfboard rotates through the surfers available on shift to fairly distributes sessions – ensuring everyone does their fair share while utilising the time available.
Activity Plans let you schedule your team’s time in different ways, so you can quickly and easily adapt the schedule to suit your priorities and needs.
Set the priorities and the coverage or time needed for each of your channels and tasks, like phone, email or chat, then let Surfboard automatically schedule for you. Activities are fairly distributed amongst your team, keeping your team happy and your channels well-staffed.
Create as many Activity Plans as you need to be used and reused. Whether it’s extending your opening hours for peak times, dealing with absences, or handling a flurry of unexpected phone calls. Once applied to the schedule, the Activity Plan will generate fair intraday schedules for all surfers on shift to meet the rules you created.
Scheduling breaks is never easy, even if your team all work 9-5. Distributing them fairly to maintain coverage is a headache, and if your team are working a variety of shifts with a wide range of start and end times, it’s even more complex.
Surfboard’s break scheduling tool allows you to fairly and automatically distribute breaks and easily set them up for different shifts. Ensure everyone in your team gets the rest they need, without sacrificing service.
Easily schedule, track and report overtime for your team using Surfboard. When scheduling, it’s easy to keep track of the number of hours you’ve scheduled for your team, including warnings where contracts are breached.
Surfers can report their own overtime on shifts or unscheduled work which feeds directly into downloadable timesheets.
We know that schedules are never finished. You prepare the perfect schedule and then life happens; surfers call in sick, book extra time off, or as we saw in 2022, surprise bank holidays happen.
Making edits to a schedule that has already been shared with a team can be anxiety-inducing, and involve a lot of shuffling around to cater for change requests while also achieving the right level of coverage. Having a live audience for that doesn’t help, and that’s why we’ve built Draft & Publish.
Plan in peace, and when you’re ready, instantly publish the dates that you’re ready to share at the click of a button.
Easily stay on top of your surfers’ contracted hours. See a weekly summary of how many hours your team are working whilst you’re planning and after a schedule has been published. If you accidentally overschedule a surfer, we’ll highlight it clearly for you in the schedule.
Don’t get caught out by missing your team’s scheduled time off. By automatically syncing your team’s time off into Surfboard, you’ll get notified when it conflicts with any existing Shifts, Round Robins, and Activities.
Don’t limit your team to the standard 9 – 5. Assign multiple shifts within a day in Surfboard and let your team get the work-life balance they deserve. Make shift planning for students, parents and even outsourced teams easy and fair.
Ensuring that your surfers are compensated fairly and have the opportunity to rest and recharge after periods of intense work is crucial. Scheduling time off in lieu is easy with Surfboard. It can be automatically scheduled as part of a Round Robin, or you can incorporate it into your schedules with the Pattern Builder. If anything slips through the cracks, you can quickly and easily edit your schedule.
Surfboard’s Round Robin scheduling tool fairly distributes shifts across team members. Whether it’s a weekend shift, morning shift, or even an unpopular Friday night shift, Round Robin scheduling means you can fairly share these working hours across your team, reducing burnout and increasing morale.
Take complex shift patterns, and make them simple with Surfboard’s Pattern Builder – a completely interactive, visual way to plan your surfers’ shifts in one holistic view, giving you full transparency over when your surfers are working and how that relates to the rest of the team.
Planning shifts for a CS team isn’t always plain sailing. There are ups and downs, and a schedule that worked last month may not work well the next.
Surfboard’s Shift Plans allow you to easily handle seasonality and ensure your team is ready to ride any wave that hits. Whether you’re creating your rolling business-as-usual Shift Plan or planning for peak times like Black Friday, you can achieve it with a Shift Plan.
Use and reuse your Shift Plans as much as you like, and update them as your company scales and your team changes.