Who can use this feature?
- Available with Workforce.
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Once your apps are configured and WorkflowIDs are enabled, Workflow Intelligence provides a detailed, process-oriented view of your team's work. This article covers how to analyze workflows even before you add Key Activities: scoping a question, reading the canvas, measuring total effort, reviewing individual instances, and spotting inefficiencies.
This article covers the following:
- Asking and scoping a question
- Reading the canvas
- Measuring Total Organization Effort
- Reviewing individual instances
- How Workforce builds a workflow: the collection of pages
- Spotting inefficiency signals
- Watching session replay from a node
- Frequently Asked Questions
Asking and scoping a question
Analysis starts with a question about how your team performs, such as "How effectively is my team handling tickets in Zendesk?" You frame and scope that question using the filters in the left panel, which narrow the workflow down to the work you care about.
- Employee: focus on the work of one or more specific people.
- Activity: focus on instances where a particular activity occurred.
- Time: focus on a specific date range.
The filters in the left panel apply to both the aggregate view and the list of individual instances, so you can move between the big picture and specific examples without losing your scope.
Reading the canvas
The canvas in the center of the screen is a generalized process map. It shows how work flows from a first touch through to completion, and it is a view of how well your team adheres to the process you intend for them to follow.
Note: The canvas naturally draws attention because of its size, but it is an exploration tool rather than the end goal. Its purpose is to help you investigate which patterns and behaviors move your key metric. Without Key Activities in place, most of the value on this page comes from the Workflow Insights panel described below.
Measuring Total Organization Effort
The Workflow Insights panel on the right aggregates all active working time associated with a workflow, including cross-app activity. This total is often called Total Organization Effort, and it is a North Star metric for many teams because it quantifies how much human effort a process actually consumes.
Leaders use Total Organization Effort to:
- Understand the opportunity size of fully automating a process, which helps prioritize where investment will have the highest economic impact.
- Measure the impact of an investment made to reduce the human effort a process requires.
- Understand the tool mix and application footprint of a process, answering "How is employee time distributed across the stack?" and revealing opportunities to consolidate work into fewer applications.
Note: Hovering over Total Active Time or any individual app reveals the Min, Median, Max, and Standard Deviation for that measure.
Reviewing individual instances
Beyond the aggregate view, Workforce keeps a detailed record of every individual instance of a workflow it observes. Reviewing individual instances supports several use cases:
- Root cause analysis: for example, a poor CSAT score prompts a support leader to investigate how a case was handled, understand where it went wrong, and course-correct through coaching.
- Process auditing: for example, a loan discrepancy prompts a claims manager to confirm whether a field was modified by the agent or the customer.
- Quality assurance: for example, a QA analyst reviews randomly selected tickets to measure response quality and identify coaching opportunities.
- Process observation and shadowing: for example, a process improvement leader reviews instances to research best practices and update Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) based on actual behavior.
The Instances table
The Instances view displays all instances that match the filters selected in the left panel. All columns are sortable, and each row can be clicked into to open the individual instance.
The individual instance view
The individual instance view displays all activity for a particular WorkflowID, from the first observation to the last. The canvas populates a node each time employee activity related to the instance is captured, and any additional tracked applications the employee used during that period appear within the same node.
How Workforce builds a workflow: the collection of pages
Workforce does not work in terms of sessions the way Fullstory Analytics does. Instead, the activity it shows is based on a collection of pages assembled for each unit of work:
- Any pages from the primary application that carry the WorkflowID page property.
- Any pages from supporting applications that were accessed in the same timeframe.
Activity accumulates within a node until 60 minutes have elapsed since the employee last interacted with a page containing the WorkflowID. Additional nodes appear on the canvas whenever the same instance is accessed by a different employee, or revisited later by the same employee.
Case Swivels
A case swivel is when an employee switches to another ID of the same type of WorkflowID. For example, if a user is working on one Zendesk ticket and switches to a different Zendesk ticket, that's a case swivel.
Because a workflow is a collection of pages, you can toggle Case Swivels on or off in the left panel. Turning Case Swivels off removes pages with a different WorkflowID that were worked at the same time, so you see only the case in question. Some teams prefer to leave them on—especially in linear workflows where researching related cases is considered part of the investigation.
Note: Not seeing Case Swivels on the left panel? Try searching for an individual item by entering an ID in the barcode field up top. Complex cases are more likely to have case swivels.
Spotting inefficiency signals
As you review workflows, several signals help you identify bottlenecks and repetitive work that may be ripe for automation.
- Copy-and-paste signals: copy-paste activity tends to happen in bursts during working periods. These "time drips" add up to meaningful inefficiency and often point to manual steps that could be automated.
- Swivel chair behavior: this shows how often an employee works multiple cases at the same time. Many SOPs limit agents to one or two concurrent cases to avoid spreading cognitive load too thin, so this signal helps you see whether swivel-chairing is slowing your team down.
- Time between key activities: shift-select two steps on the canvas to measure the time that elapses between them. This gives quick answers to questions about how long work sits between key moments in a process.
- Participants and handoffs: the number of people involved in an instance correlates with how long it takes. In one example, tickets handled by a single person averaged about 1.7 hours, while tickets touched by two or more people took considerably longer—likely due to gaps between handoffs.
Watching session replay from a node
Clicking the play button on any node opens a cross-domain session replay. This is distinct from replay in Fullstory Analytics: it represents all activity in that node, providing a ground-truth recreation of what the employee did while active in the workflow, both within and across applications.
The replay experience also includes:
- A summary of the working block.
- An events list, where you can see where copy-and-paste blocks and handoff delays occur.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I see cases that seem unrelated to the one I'm investigating?
A workflow is built from a collection of pages, which can include other cases an employee worked at the same time. Turn off Case Swivels in the left panel to remove pages with a different WorkflowID and focus only on the case in question.
Why does one workflow instance have multiple nodes?
Activity accumulates in a node until 60 minutes pass without interaction on a page containing the WorkflowID. A new node appears whenever the instance is revisited later, or when a different employee works on it.
How is this different from active time in Fullstory Analytics?
Workflow Insights aggregates active working time across all the applications involved in a workflow. For the underlying definition of active, focused, and visible-tab time, see Workforce Active Time.