Hello Zoho Voice Team,
We would like to submit a feature request regarding the current limitation on agent status definitions in Zoho Voice.
Current Limitation
At present, Zoho Voice only supports a fixed set of predefined agent statuses, such as:Available, Busy, On Break And Offline
Custom agent statuses are not supported, and organizations cannot extend or define additional statuses based on their operational needs.
Problem Statement
In real-world contact center operations, the default status set is often too limited to accurately reflect what agents are actually doing during their shifts.
As a result:
- Supervisors have limited visibility into real agent activity
- All non-call activities are grouped into broad categories (e.g. “Busy” or “Break”)
- It becomes difficult to understand operational bottlenecks or productivity patterns
- Workforce management and coaching insights are significantly reduced
Many organizations rely on more granular status tracking to manage complex support environments.
Use Case
In our operations, we currently use a wide range of statuses in our existing PBX system to reflect real-time agent activity, such as:
- Team Meeting
- Training
- System Issue
- Follow-up Work
- After Call Work (extended handling)
- Customer Escalation Handling
- Administrative Tasks
These statuses allow supervisors to clearly understand:
- What each agent is doing at any moment
- How time is distributed across activities
- Where operational inefficiencies occur
- How to better allocate workload and coaching time
Without custom statuses, all of these activities are grouped into generic categories, reducing visibility and operational control.
Requested Enhancement
We would like Zoho Voice to introduce support for custom agent statuses, allowing administrators to:
1. Define Custom Status Types
Create organization-specific agent statuses
Define status names and categories
and map them to system behavior (Available / Busy / Offline logic)
2. Reporting Support
Include custom statuses in reporting dashboards
Track time spent in each custom status
Allow filtering and analytics per status type
3. Supervisor Visibility
Display custom statuses in real-time agent monitoring dashboards
Allow supervisors to understand exactly what each agent is doing during their shift
Business Benefits
This enhancement would:
- Provide far more accurate workforce visibility
- Enable better operational monitoring and coaching
- Improve understanding of agent workload distribution
- Support advanced contact center use cases beyond basic telephony
- Align Zoho Voice with other PBX and contact center systems
- Allow organizations to model real business processes instead of forcing simplified categories
Conclusion
The current fixed-status model is sufficient for basic use cases, but it limits operational visibility for teams managing structured contact center environments.
Introducing custom agent statuses would significantly improve Zoho Voice’s suitability for professional support operations and provide supervisors with the clarity needed for effective workforce management.
Thank you for considering this enhancement.
Kind regards,
Ram