Contact centers without the right insights and tools may find it hard to create balanced schedules that prioritize customer experience while considering employee hours, contracts, preferences and labor laws. Optimizing employees’ schedules is a tricky balance between customer experience and higher workforce costs. Without the ability to create forecasts easily and accurately, it’s a challenge to schedule your workforce effectively.

The goal of resource management is to provide the right balance between business objectives and employee work/life balance. Genesys Cloud CX automatically gathers interaction data and produces the most mathematically accurate forecast possible(>95%) . Genesys Cloud CX schedules can be built for multiple weeks across multiple management units accommodating performance goals, constraints, labour laws and union agreements.

Contact centers are complex, continually changing entities. They often have a large human resource with varied skills and operates long hours, making Resource management a challenge. If any one element falls away – agents calling in sick, for example – the entire process could break down. Spreadsheets were once the method of choice for resource management, and creating these spreadsheets manually required a skilled, numbers-savvy manager. As the contact center becomes increasingly complex. However, manual processes become less feasible.

Forecasting expected interaction volume and creating schedules for agents are two of the most important roles of resource management. It’s tricky to get right: if you under-staff the center, customer satisfaction levels go down and agents become burned out.

Resource management software can help eliminate some of the most time-consuming tasks for managers while simultaneously increasing the accuracy of forecasts and the flexibility of schedules. Some of the most common challenges of resource management are:

• Inaccurate forecasts – While managers traditionally use historical data to create forecasts, there are other factors to consider (time of year, marketing activities and even weather). The more data points involved, the more fallible manual calculations become.

• An inability to be all channels- While interactions may take up most of the resource’s time, other contact media, and even manual tasks must be factored into forecasts and schedules.

•  A lack of real-time exception planning – An employee may need to leave suddenly, or an unexpected spike in volume could consume more resources than expected.

• Limitations to physical premises- While your current methods of scheduling and forecasting may work well enough for employees on your physical premises, what about remote employees? or business partners?

• Problems with adherence – Schedule adherence is critical to a well-run contact center, but manual methods don’t account for it. If your customer interactions are time sensitive, understanding your resourcing shortfalls and availability can improve customer experience.

Resource management is all about assigning the right employees with the right skills to the right job at the right time and through a platform that address most of the well-known challenges. Challenges such as forecasting accuracy, multichannel resource allocation, exception handling, and adherence control have been around for a while. However, a wealth of resource management software today continues to use Erlang-C based forecasting and scheduling algorithms which do not provide the accuracy, processing speed nor the agility required to fulfill the expected digital channel explosion (digital transformation), the rise of asynchronous messaging and combined self and agent-assisted journeys.

Genesys Cloud Resource management helps simplify the process of forecasting interactions and scheduling employees in multichannel contact experience environment. Its AI-powered core capabilities help companies optimize resource utilization through highly accurate forecasts and lightning fast scheduling so that supervisors can spend more time coaching their agents to achieve organizational goals.

Genesys Tempo is a mobile application on iOS and Android platforms for Genesys Cloud. It empowers the workforce to achieve a work-life balance with the ability to self-manage their working hours from their mobile device. Through this app, employees can view their schedule, receive notifications when a schedule is added, changed or removed, and keep track of their working hours quickly and efficiently. They can also put in time-off requests and receive notifications when request statuses change or changes occur. With the latest release, users can now see what days are available for leave, which slots are filling up quickly and where they are in line for waitlisted time-off requests.

By applying other workforce engagement capabilities, facilities and resource management teams can determine new arrangements for flexible work-time allocation, work-remote scenarios, gamification, and other employee self-managed services. This is done through agile, upgrade-free, and rapid innovations delivery in a single platform to keep operational efficiency, effectiveness, and business performance under control.

Resource Management forms part of the critical operations in all modern customer experience environments and is a process that maximizes performance levels and competency for a Contact center. The process includes all the activities that are needed to maintain a productive workforce, such as human resource management, budgeting, forecasting, scheduling, and analytics.

Genesys Cloud Resource management provides software to support contact center workforce management that delivers a set of optimized schedules, utilizing agent skills and contract rules while providing editing and monitoring capabilities for the contact center. Demand-oriented resource management enables planners to optimize staffing by creating schedules that conform to the forecasted requirements. At the same time, a resource management solution helps organizations manage adherence to all relevant legislation, local agreements, and the contracts of individual employees such as work-life balance guidelines.

In today’s world of multiple digital channels, a contact center could have set call hours but digital channels are always on. Without the right insights, it’s hard to create balanced schedules that allow contact centers to be responsive to digital interactions while considering employee hours, contracts, preferences, time off, and labor laws.

Genesys Cloud Resource management helps you find the right balance. Genesys solution automatically gathers data, making it easy to get accurate forecasts and scheduling scenarios across channels. Factor in arrival patterns and hours of operation to cover your bases, and get real-time insight and monitoring into SLAs and schedule adherence.

Business Logic

A prerequisite to any basic WFM deployment is a formal discovery process. The formal discovery process produces specific documentation.

Distribution Logic

N/A

Resource Management features are accessible from the Genesys Cloud application.

Real-time Reporting

Genesys Cloud WFM comes with several Reporting and Analytics features.

For detailed reporting features: /articles/about-reports-views-and-dashboards/

Historical Reporting

Genesys Cloud WFM comes with several Reporting and Analytics features.

For detailed reporting features: /articles/about-reports-views-and-dashboards/

• Workforce Resource Management is available for the Inbound Interaction type for all channels.
• A Business unit is limited to 5,000 agents.
• A management unit is limited to 1,500 agents.
• The use case does not include any of these advanced options:
  • Integration to 3rd party WFM tools (There are native integrations for some. There are public APIs’s available as well. APIs are available to those agents that want to use them.)
  • Advanced Customization – API customization
• Bullseye Routing configurations will not be supported as bullseye routing and WFM don’t play too well together. It’s not best practice.
• Scheduled callbacks, non-scheduled callback, and ACD Voicemail appear as callbacks in forecast and schedules.
• The setup of Business units, Planning groups, Service Goal templates, Management units, Agents, Activity Codes, and basic Work plans are a prerequisite for planning. These objects must be configured and required permissions to use them and set them must be in place. Genesys Professional services can be used for initial setup of the pre-requisites.
• Complete the initial setup to before creating any schedule

N/A

• V 1.1.2 last updated September 15, 2022