WFM Adherence Alerts

Status: Public Preview — behaviour may change.

What it does

Adherence alerts push an in-app notification to supervisors (and optionally the representative) the moment someone drifts out of adherence with their published shift, instead of making the supervisor watch the adherence tracker for it. A background monitor compares actual presence against the day's scheduled activity on a recurring cycle and raises the alert when a representative scheduled for a monitored activity type isn't where the schedule says they should be.

Key facts

Off by default. An administrator has to turn it on under Workforce management > Intraday management > Workforce alerts (preview) in the Copilot Service admin center before supervisors see the page at all.
One toggle controls both adherence alerts and the sibling volume spike alerts — you can't enable one without the other.
Alerts only cover published shift plans; unpublished plans aren't selectable.
You scope an alert by planning group, one or more shift plans, and linked activity types — only activity types with "Track adherence" turned on are selectable, so alerts naturally skip breaks/training unless you've deliberately flagged those for tracking.
If the planning group is "Not applicable", every shift plan you select has to share a time zone — the picker locks out other zones after your first choice.
Alerts are informational only: they don't touch presence, don't reroute conversations, and don't change the published schedule.
Alert details link straight to the real-time adherence tracker for the full team view, and to the adherence history report for the historical angle.
Turning the feature off preserves existing alert definitions but stops new notifications and blocks supervisors from creating or editing alerts.

When to use / skip

Use this once you already have shift plans and the adherence tracker in play and supervisors are actually acting on drift — it's a notification layer on top of tracking you should already be doing, not a replacement for it. Skip it for centres running informal or highly flexible schedules where "out of adherence" isn't a meaningful signal, or where you haven't tuned the adherence tracker enough yet to trust what it's telling you; turning alerts on before that just trains supervisors to ignore notifications.

Configuration decisions

Which activity types trigger alerts — only flag "Track adherence" on activities where a deviation actually costs you (call, chat), not on breaks or training, or you'll bury supervisors in noise.
Alert expiration date — defaults to the latest expiration across the selected shift plans; decide whether you actually want it running that long or want to force a periodic review.
Who gets notified — the notification recipients list is required and separate from whether the representative themselves is told.
Whether to notify representatives — turning this on gives the affected rep a "Check schedule" link, but only if the schedule calendar is enabled; otherwise they get the nudge with no way to act on it from the notification.
Planning group vs "Not applicable" — using a planning group is the only way to mix shift plans across time zones in one alert.

Gotchas

You can't change the planning group or shift plans after creating an alert. Get the scope right up front, because "edit" only covers activity types, expiration, recipients and the rep-notification flag — a scope change means a new alert.
The alert isn't real-time. The background monitor evaluates on a cycle, so the "As of" timestamp is the last evaluation, not the current state — for current state you still need the adherence tracker.
"Notify service representatives" is a dead toggle without the schedule calendar enabled. Reps still get the activity alert but lose the "Check schedule" action, and it's easy to enable one without the other and not notice.
Deleting an alert is permanent, with no soft-delete or recovery path mentioned.
This is a different feature from the adherence tracker and the adherence history report (both already documented) — it's the proactive push notification on top of the two pull-based views. Don't conflate the three when scoping client asks.

Consultant notes

This is the feature to point at when a client asks "why do supervisors have to keep the adherence tracker open all day" — it closes that gap, but only for the activity types you deliberately opt in. Scope the activity type list with the client before go-live, or the first week will be either silence (nothing tracked) or alert fatigue (everything tracked).
Because scope can't be edited after creation, don't let a supervisor create alerts ad hoc during UAT and expect to tidy them up later — agree the alert inventory (which planning groups, which plans, which activity types) as a design decision, not a runtime one.
Being preview, expect the usual caveats: no SLA commitment, and Microsoft can change alert timing, fields or the admin toggle path before GA. Flag it as preview to the client and revisit this doc once it ships.

Worth revisiting once this leaves preview, or if Microsoft changes the shared toggle with volume spike alerts.