Workforce Engagement Management

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------

Hi Jennifer,

this isn't something that we currently support. We are looking at expanding the self-scheduling features so that things like this are possible.

In order to protect Service Goals and ensure that there is a consistent customer experience, we are thinking more along the lines of suggested alternative times for scheduled breaks and lunches, rather than the agent being able to stipulate the times.
Would this approach work for you?

There is also this idea WFMSCH-I-84 in the Genesys Ideas lab for trading lunches and breaks.

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------

Hi Paul,

To expand on Jennifers idea, I think the main use case is agents can almost never go at their planned time because we cannot plan for a call to come in. Some ideas we have come up with in our org to allow this, but are not able to be done at this time in Genesys:

• Increase the time limit for "Adherence Exception Threshold" from 5 minutes. This would not solve all issues, but would be the easiest to implement.
• Allow us to define certain activities with "live" flexibility. Currently we can define flexible start times which allows the schedule generator to determine the best start time based on forecast. Allow us to define in the work plan "this break can start 10 minutes early or late without impacting adherence". Again, this would not solve all of the issues and would be harder to implement than idea #1 but would give us more granular control over the adherence exception threshold.
• Allow us to ignore adherence for certain activities when other conditions are met. Currently we can set up certain activities to be ignored for adherence. This is too lenient in many cases. We want agents to go on break as soon as their call is over. If they decide to work on something else off queue and then take break that is not acceptable so we want their adherence to be impacted when they aren't taking a break. However if they are on a long call that is more excusable. Defining it would be along the lines of "If agent is scheduled for Break && agent status is On Queue:Interacting" would be extremely beneficial on its own. To push it further, automatically adjusting the schedule to push the break to the end of the call when the rule is set up would most likely alleviate all issues we face around breaks/meals and adherence. This would be the best option in my opinion but also one that would be difficult to implement due to how many dependencies it would face. 
• Finally, take WFM into consideration with Routing. We have seen in some of the roadmaps the plans to include headcount from WFM in EWT, but take it a step further and lower agent priority within a threshold of an off queue activity. This way new calls do not route to them unless the call center is under serious stress. This would probably be the most difficult to implement and would not fix the issue WFM staff face daily, but would help with the capacity planning side of the problem and could partner well with the 3rd bullet point. 

Hi Jennifer,

this isn't something that we currently support. We are looking at expanding the self-scheduling features so that things like this are possible.

In order to protect Service Goals and ensure that there is a consistent customer experience, we are thinking more along the lines of suggested alternative times for scheduled breaks and lunches, rather than the agent being able to stipulate the times.
Would this approach work for you?

There is also this idea WFMSCH-I-84 in the Genesys Ideas lab for trading lunches and breaks.

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------

Hi Paul,

To expand on Jennifers idea, I think the main use case is agents can almost never go at their planned time because we cannot plan for a call to come in. Some ideas we have come up with in our org to allow this, but are not able to be done at this time in Genesys:

• Increase the time limit for "Adherence Exception Threshold" from 5 minutes. This would not solve all issues, but would be the easiest to implement.
• Allow us to define certain activities with "live" flexibility. Currently we can define flexible start times which allows the schedule generator to determine the best start time based on forecast. Allow us to define in the work plan "this break can start 10 minutes early or late without impacting adherence". Again, this would not solve all of the issues and would be harder to implement than idea #1 but would give us more granular control over the adherence exception threshold.
• Allow us to ignore adherence for certain activities when other conditions are met. Currently we can set up certain activities to be ignored for adherence. This is too lenient in many cases. We want agents to go on break as soon as their call is over. If they decide to work on something else off queue and then take break that is not acceptable so we want their adherence to be impacted when they aren't taking a break. However if they are on a long call that is more excusable. Defining it would be along the lines of "If agent is scheduled for Break && agent status is On Queue:Interacting" would be extremely beneficial on its own. To push it further, automatically adjusting the schedule to push the break to the end of the call when the rule is set up would most likely alleviate all issues we face around breaks/meals and adherence. This would be the best option in my opinion but also one that would be difficult to implement due to how many dependencies it would face. 
• Finally, take WFM into consideration with Routing. We have seen in some of the roadmaps the plans to include headcount from WFM in EWT, but take it a step further and lower agent priority within a threshold of an off queue activity. This way new calls do not route to them unless the call center is under serious stress. This would probably be the most difficult to implement and would not fix the issue WFM staff face daily, but would help with the capacity planning side of the problem and could partner well with the 3rd bullet point. 

------------------------------
Aaron Buckley
Breezeline

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 05:30
From: Paul Wood
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Jennifer,

this isn't something that we currently support. We are looking at expanding the self-scheduling features so that things like this are possible.

In order to protect Service Goals and ensure that there is a consistent customer experience, we are thinking more along the lines of suggested alternative times for scheduled breaks and lunches, rather than the agent being able to stipulate the times.
Would this approach work for you?

There is also this idea WFMSCH-I-84 in the Genesys Ideas lab for trading lunches and breaks.

------------------------------
Paul Wood
Product Manager for Genesys Cloud Workforce Management

Original Message:
Sent: 04-05-2023 11:58
From: Jennifer DiCesare
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------

Schedule adherence is important. Regardless of reason the schedule could not be adhered to, the schedule was not adhered to. Paradoxically there seems to be an over concentration on schedule adherence combined with a desire to essentially hide or at least dampen non-adherence events - it is being treated as important but yet there is a desire to obfuscate the truth. Instead of all the possible things that could be done, a simple adjustment of mindset of what good adherence is might be the answer. E.g., instead of 98% as a 'goal' you go with 97% (14.4 minutes of non-adherence in an 8h shift versus 9.6 minutes).

Agents have threads on reddit about ways to essentially get by without taking interactions. The more exception processing done up front the more likely you are creating save havens for problematic agents.

If you are thinking about increasing adherence exception threshold significantly, you should check the math to make sure it makes sense. For a shift with two breaks and a meal there would be 8 activity transactions (shift start, break start, break end, meal start, meal end, break start, break end, shift end). 8 * 5 minutes = 40 minutes (91.67% adherence for an 8h shift - which is pretty bad).

The other recommendation is to concentrate more on conformance if it is more important for you to know how much on queue time was given by the agent compared to plan versus the agents adhering to the schedule (shift/activity starts/stops). 

------------------------------
Jay Langsford
VP, R&D

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 12:17
From: Aaron Buckley
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Paul,

To expand on Jennifers idea, I think the main use case is agents can almost never go at their planned time because we cannot plan for a call to come in. Some ideas we have come up with in our org to allow this, but are not able to be done at this time in Genesys:

• Increase the time limit for "Adherence Exception Threshold" from 5 minutes. This would not solve all issues, but would be the easiest to implement.
• Allow us to define certain activities with "live" flexibility. Currently we can define flexible start times which allows the schedule generator to determine the best start time based on forecast. Allow us to define in the work plan "this break can start 10 minutes early or late without impacting adherence". Again, this would not solve all of the issues and would be harder to implement than idea #1 but would give us more granular control over the adherence exception threshold.
• Allow us to ignore adherence for certain activities when other conditions are met. Currently we can set up certain activities to be ignored for adherence. This is too lenient in many cases. We want agents to go on break as soon as their call is over. If they decide to work on something else off queue and then take break that is not acceptable so we want their adherence to be impacted when they aren't taking a break. However if they are on a long call that is more excusable. Defining it would be along the lines of "If agent is scheduled for Break && agent status is On Queue:Interacting" would be extremely beneficial on its own. To push it further, automatically adjusting the schedule to push the break to the end of the call when the rule is set up would most likely alleviate all issues we face around breaks/meals and adherence. This would be the best option in my opinion but also one that would be difficult to implement due to how many dependencies it would face. 
• Finally, take WFM into consideration with Routing. We have seen in some of the roadmaps the plans to include headcount from WFM in EWT, but take it a step further and lower agent priority within a threshold of an off queue activity. This way new calls do not route to them unless the call center is under serious stress. This would probably be the most difficult to implement and would not fix the issue WFM staff face daily, but would help with the capacity planning side of the problem and could partner well with the 3rd bullet point. 

------------------------------
Aaron Buckley
Breezeline

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 05:30
From: Paul Wood
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Jennifer,

this isn't something that we currently support. We are looking at expanding the self-scheduling features so that things like this are possible.

In order to protect Service Goals and ensure that there is a consistent customer experience, we are thinking more along the lines of suggested alternative times for scheduled breaks and lunches, rather than the agent being able to stipulate the times.
Would this approach work for you?

There is also this idea WFMSCH-I-84 in the Genesys Ideas lab for trading lunches and breaks.

------------------------------
Paul Wood
Product Manager for Genesys Cloud Workforce Management

Original Message:
Sent: 04-05-2023 11:58
From: Jennifer DiCesare
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------

Schedule adherence is important. Regardless of reason the schedule could not be adhered to, the schedule was not adhered to. Paradoxically there seems to be an over concentration on schedule adherence combined with a desire to essentially hide or at least dampen non-adherence events - it is being treated as important but yet there is a desire to obfuscate the truth. Instead of all the possible things that could be done, a simple adjustment of mindset of what good adherence is might be the answer. E.g., instead of 98% as a 'goal' you go with 97% (14.4 minutes of non-adherence in an 8h shift versus 9.6 minutes).

Agents have threads on reddit about ways to essentially get by without taking interactions. The more exception processing done up front the more likely you are creating save havens for problematic agents.

If you are thinking about increasing adherence exception threshold significantly, you should check the math to make sure it makes sense. For a shift with two breaks and a meal there would be 8 activity transactions (shift start, break start, break end, meal start, meal end, break start, break end, shift end). 8 * 5 minutes = 40 minutes (91.67% adherence for an 8h shift - which is pretty bad).

The other recommendation is to concentrate more on conformance if it is more important for you to know how much on queue time was given by the agent compared to plan versus the agents adhering to the schedule (shift/activity starts/stops). 

------------------------------
Jay Langsford
VP, R&D

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 12:17
From: Aaron Buckley
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Paul,

To expand on Jennifers idea, I think the main use case is agents can almost never go at their planned time because we cannot plan for a call to come in. Some ideas we have come up with in our org to allow this, but are not able to be done at this time in Genesys:

• Increase the time limit for "Adherence Exception Threshold" from 5 minutes. This would not solve all issues, but would be the easiest to implement.
• Allow us to define certain activities with "live" flexibility. Currently we can define flexible start times which allows the schedule generator to determine the best start time based on forecast. Allow us to define in the work plan "this break can start 10 minutes early or late without impacting adherence". Again, this would not solve all of the issues and would be harder to implement than idea #1 but would give us more granular control over the adherence exception threshold.
• Allow us to ignore adherence for certain activities when other conditions are met. Currently we can set up certain activities to be ignored for adherence. This is too lenient in many cases. We want agents to go on break as soon as their call is over. If they decide to work on something else off queue and then take break that is not acceptable so we want their adherence to be impacted when they aren't taking a break. However if they are on a long call that is more excusable. Defining it would be along the lines of "If agent is scheduled for Break && agent status is On Queue:Interacting" would be extremely beneficial on its own. To push it further, automatically adjusting the schedule to push the break to the end of the call when the rule is set up would most likely alleviate all issues we face around breaks/meals and adherence. This would be the best option in my opinion but also one that would be difficult to implement due to how many dependencies it would face. 
• Finally, take WFM into consideration with Routing. We have seen in some of the roadmaps the plans to include headcount from WFM in EWT, but take it a step further and lower agent priority within a threshold of an off queue activity. This way new calls do not route to them unless the call center is under serious stress. This would probably be the most difficult to implement and would not fix the issue WFM staff face daily, but would help with the capacity planning side of the problem and could partner well with the 3rd bullet point. 

------------------------------
Aaron Buckley
Breezeline

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 05:30
From: Paul Wood
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Jennifer,

this isn't something that we currently support. We are looking at expanding the self-scheduling features so that things like this are possible.

In order to protect Service Goals and ensure that there is a consistent customer experience, we are thinking more along the lines of suggested alternative times for scheduled breaks and lunches, rather than the agent being able to stipulate the times.
Would this approach work for you?

There is also this idea WFMSCH-I-84 in the Genesys Ideas lab for trading lunches and breaks.

------------------------------
Paul Wood
Product Manager for Genesys Cloud Workforce Management

Original Message:
Sent: 04-05-2023 11:58
From: Jennifer DiCesare
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------

Hi Jennifer, 

below I've listed a few other ideas that might help with some of the issues that you have mentioned. Please have a look at these and add to the votes and conversations to help us shape and prioritise future features.

WEM-I-834 - Adherence Explanations, this is an addition to the Reporting Late functionality that is now available via the Tempo App. To help with employee engagement, schedule/adherence ownership and schedule maintenance. The employee will be able to proactively report why they are out of adherence and for how long:

-Complex Interaction
-Meeting overrunning
-Training overrunning
-Late taking break
-System issues...

This will then report to the supervisor the "why" without having to be chased. The supervisor can then approve/reject the reason if approved the out-of-adherence period will be treated as adherent, without the need for a schedule edit. 

This helps with the age-old issue that Jay mentioned around obscuring the true adherence to schedule by making the schedule retrofit the adherence.

WFMSCH-I-84 - trading Breaks and Lunches

WFMSCH-I-71- Employee Self-scheduling, this will bring the ability to schedule their own Activity Codes to the employee. Self-scheduled activities will be based on Admin configured business rules to ensure that the resulting Schedule still meets the business requirements while accommodating the employee's needs.

Thank you, and Aaron, for your feedback and use cases it really helps us understand the real-world challenges and application of the solution.

Paul

Schedule adherence is important. Regardless of reason the schedule could not be adhered to, the schedule was not adhered to. Paradoxically there seems to be an over concentration on schedule adherence combined with a desire to essentially hide or at least dampen non-adherence events - it is being treated as important but yet there is a desire to obfuscate the truth. Instead of all the possible things that could be done, a simple adjustment of mindset of what good adherence is might be the answer. E.g., instead of 98% as a 'goal' you go with 97% (14.4 minutes of non-adherence in an 8h shift versus 9.6 minutes).

Agents have threads on reddit about ways to essentially get by without taking interactions. The more exception processing done up front the more likely you are creating save havens for problematic agents.

If you are thinking about increasing adherence exception threshold significantly, you should check the math to make sure it makes sense. For a shift with two breaks and a meal there would be 8 activity transactions (shift start, break start, break end, meal start, meal end, break start, break end, shift end). 8 * 5 minutes = 40 minutes (91.67% adherence for an 8h shift - which is pretty bad).

The other recommendation is to concentrate more on conformance if it is more important for you to know how much on queue time was given by the agent compared to plan versus the agents adhering to the schedule (shift/activity starts/stops). 

------------------------------
Jay Langsford
VP, R&D

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 12:17
From: Aaron Buckley
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Paul,

To expand on Jennifers idea, I think the main use case is agents can almost never go at their planned time because we cannot plan for a call to come in. Some ideas we have come up with in our org to allow this, but are not able to be done at this time in Genesys:

• Increase the time limit for "Adherence Exception Threshold" from 5 minutes. This would not solve all issues, but would be the easiest to implement.
• Allow us to define certain activities with "live" flexibility. Currently we can define flexible start times which allows the schedule generator to determine the best start time based on forecast. Allow us to define in the work plan "this break can start 10 minutes early or late without impacting adherence". Again, this would not solve all of the issues and would be harder to implement than idea #1 but would give us more granular control over the adherence exception threshold.
• Allow us to ignore adherence for certain activities when other conditions are met. Currently we can set up certain activities to be ignored for adherence. This is too lenient in many cases. We want agents to go on break as soon as their call is over. If they decide to work on something else off queue and then take break that is not acceptable so we want their adherence to be impacted when they aren't taking a break. However if they are on a long call that is more excusable. Defining it would be along the lines of "If agent is scheduled for Break && agent status is On Queue:Interacting" would be extremely beneficial on its own. To push it further, automatically adjusting the schedule to push the break to the end of the call when the rule is set up would most likely alleviate all issues we face around breaks/meals and adherence. This would be the best option in my opinion but also one that would be difficult to implement due to how many dependencies it would face. 
• Finally, take WFM into consideration with Routing. We have seen in some of the roadmaps the plans to include headcount from WFM in EWT, but take it a step further and lower agent priority within a threshold of an off queue activity. This way new calls do not route to them unless the call center is under serious stress. This would probably be the most difficult to implement and would not fix the issue WFM staff face daily, but would help with the capacity planning side of the problem and could partner well with the 3rd bullet point. 

------------------------------
Aaron Buckley
Breezeline

Original Message:
Sent: 04-12-2023 05:30
From: Paul Wood
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi Jennifer,

this isn't something that we currently support. We are looking at expanding the self-scheduling features so that things like this are possible.

In order to protect Service Goals and ensure that there is a consistent customer experience, we are thinking more along the lines of suggested alternative times for scheduled breaks and lunches, rather than the agent being able to stipulate the times.
Would this approach work for you?

There is also this idea WFMSCH-I-84 in the Genesys Ideas lab for trading lunches and breaks.

------------------------------
Paul Wood
Product Manager for Genesys Cloud Workforce Management

Original Message:
Sent: 04-05-2023 11:58
From: Jennifer DiCesare
Subject: Allow agents to take break/lunch within approved range of time

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to allow agents to take their break and/or lunch within an approved range of time.  We don't normally provide a specific scheduled time for breaks, but instead allow the agent to take it within a range (ex; 9:30am-10:30am).  This allows them flexibility with other meetings and adapting to when customers are available to have calls.  It also just provides a little flexibility in their day, which we see many agents wanting, especially now that they're working remotely.

Is there any way to accommodate flexibility in break times day-to-day from the agent's perspective?

#ScheduleManagement#Workforce Management#ScheduleManagement

------------------------------
Jennifer DiCesare
Esri Canada
------------------------------