Hi all,

Our business is really enjoying the recent feature "schedule a coaching session" and have been using this process regularly to develop our agents with a session booked in every week.

One slight gripe though....

If the agent is calling in sick for their shift, team leaders and senior agents have the ability to simply override that agents shift in the roster with the "SICK" activity code.

What this then does if said agent has/had a coaching session previously booked during that shift, is whilst it does "invalidate" the session in the agents development page, for the facilitator, there is no notification and the coaching session still appears for them in the roster. 

WFM or the Leadership Team are then having to go into the agents development page and "delete" the coaching session.

One thought would be, could there be a failsafe whereby the agents status is unable to be altered without deleting the coaching session first?

I.e, if the agent phones in and says that they are not going to make it in for their shift, whoever goes to update the schedule (senior agent or team leader) wont be able to update the agent to "Sick" without deleting the coaching session first?

Alternatively, perhaps having an instant notification sent to the facilitator and/or WFM that said something along the lines of "Coaching session for XX (Agent name) has been invalidated. Click here to delete or reschedule"?

Just a thought....

Kind Regards

Adam Strang

Thank you for bringing this up! We've encountered an inconvenience around this, too. For our company, a supervisor creates the coaching, and should someone call out sick, a different person from scheduling team overwrites that day's schedule with the callout activity code. If someone calls out on Monday, for instance, and there's a coaching scheduled for that day, I've found that after I've coded the full day as out sick, the supervisor later cancels or moves the coaching, and this creates a small "on queue" segment on the sick person's Monday schedule, in the spot where the coaching used to be. I've tried deleting the coaching segment from the agent, and also from their supervisor's Genesys schedule, before marking them out sick for the day, and that doesn't fix it. Once the supervisor moves or cancels the coaching, we get that "on queue" segment again. Since I pull reports on how many hours of unscheduled absence people have, I can't leave that there, so I've taken to reaching out to supervisors every time someone calls out on a coaching day, to have the sup update the coaching first, before I update the agent's schedule to indicate they were out. Your suggestion is an interesting one, I'd love if Genesys could come up with some way to simplify updating absences that fall on the same day as a coaching! 

Hi all,

Our business is really enjoying the recent feature "schedule a coaching session" and have been using this process regularly to develop our agents with a session booked in every week.

One slight gripe though....

If the agent is calling in sick for their shift, team leaders and senior agents have the ability to simply override that agents shift in the roster with the "SICK" activity code.

What this then does if said agent has/had a coaching session previously booked during that shift, is whilst it does "invalidate" the session in the agents development page, for the facilitator, there is no notification and the coaching session still appears for them in the roster. 

WFM or the Leadership Team are then having to go into the agents development page and "delete" the coaching session.

One thought would be, could there be a failsafe whereby the agents status is unable to be altered without deleting the coaching session first?

I.e, if the agent phones in and says that they are not going to make it in for their shift, whoever goes to update the schedule (senior agent or team leader) wont be able to update the agent to "Sick" without deleting the coaching session first?

Alternatively, perhaps having an instant notification sent to the facilitator and/or WFM that said something along the lines of "Coaching session for XX (Agent name) has been invalidated. Click here to delete or reschedule"?

Just a thought....

Kind Regards

Adam Strang

Thank you both for sharing this feedback - it's incredibly valuable to hear these real-world examples of how coaching and scheduling overlap, and the challenges that can arise.

I wanted to let you know that we are actively looking into notifications more broadly across a number of features within Genesys Cloud. As part of this, coaching has been an area of discussion, and we have certainly considered how we could make invalidated sessions more visible and easier to manage. Your examples here really help reinforce the importance of this.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight that the Supervisor view in Agent Activity view includes a Coaching Compliance widget. This provides a breakdown of coaching appointments by Overdue, Invalid, and Upcoming statuses. It's designed to help supervisors stay on top of sessions that may need action, so if your supervisors are not already using it, it might offer a little help while we work toward broader improvements.

The issue around scheduling artefacts ("on queue" segments) when a coaching session is moved or canceled is also a really interesting point. There's definitely a push and pull here between supervisors, who are trying to meet coaching needs, and schedulers, who are trying to maintain a clean and accurate schedule. Thank you for putting this onto our radar - it's something I'll be looking into further.

We would absolutely welcome any more ideas you have while keeping both perspectives (supervisors and schedulers) in mind. Your input is incredibly helpful as we continue to evolve these features.

Cheers,

Thank you for bringing this up! We've encountered an inconvenience around this, too. For our company, a supervisor creates the coaching, and should someone call out sick, a different person from scheduling team overwrites that day's schedule with the callout activity code. If someone calls out on Monday, for instance, and there's a coaching scheduled for that day, I've found that after I've coded the full day as out sick, the supervisor later cancels or moves the coaching, and this creates a small "on queue" segment on the sick person's Monday schedule, in the spot where the coaching used to be. I've tried deleting the coaching segment from the agent, and also from their supervisor's Genesys schedule, before marking them out sick for the day, and that doesn't fix it. Once the supervisor moves or cancels the coaching, we get that "on queue" segment again. Since I pull reports on how many hours of unscheduled absence people have, I can't leave that there, so I've taken to reaching out to supervisors every time someone calls out on a coaching day, to have the sup update the coaching first, before I update the agent's schedule to indicate they were out. Your suggestion is an interesting one, I'd love if Genesys could come up with some way to simplify updating absences that fall on the same day as a coaching! 

Hi all,

Our business is really enjoying the recent feature "schedule a coaching session" and have been using this process regularly to develop our agents with a session booked in every week.

One slight gripe though....

If the agent is calling in sick for their shift, team leaders and senior agents have the ability to simply override that agents shift in the roster with the "SICK" activity code.

What this then does if said agent has/had a coaching session previously booked during that shift, is whilst it does "invalidate" the session in the agents development page, for the facilitator, there is no notification and the coaching session still appears for them in the roster. 

WFM or the Leadership Team are then having to go into the agents development page and "delete" the coaching session.

One thought would be, could there be a failsafe whereby the agents status is unable to be altered without deleting the coaching session first?

I.e, if the agent phones in and says that they are not going to make it in for their shift, whoever goes to update the schedule (senior agent or team leader) wont be able to update the agent to "Sick" without deleting the coaching session first?

Alternatively, perhaps having an instant notification sent to the facilitator and/or WFM that said something along the lines of "Coaching session for XX (Agent name) has been invalidated. Click here to delete or reschedule"?

Just a thought....

Kind Regards

Adam Strang

The other pain point we have around scheduling/editing/cancelling coachings is that when a coaching is cancelled, the system inserts an "off queue" segment into the supervisor's schedule in the spot where the coaching had been. So that means they can't replace that 2 PM Wed coaching by scheduling a different agent for 2 PM Wed coaching until someone goes into their schedule and removes the off-queue time slot that was dropped in there. For our company, we have one team doing the scheduling, and sups don't edit schedules at all. So supervisors have to reach out to a scheduler to update it for them. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't think of a good reason why, when a coaching is cancelled, one would want to default to keeping that time slot blocked off and un-bookable on someone's schedule. But that's what Genesys is going. 

Thank you both for sharing this feedback - it's incredibly valuable to hear these real-world examples of how coaching and scheduling overlap, and the challenges that can arise.

I wanted to let you know that we are actively looking into notifications more broadly across a number of features within Genesys Cloud. As part of this, coaching has been an area of discussion, and we have certainly considered how we could make invalidated sessions more visible and easier to manage. Your examples here really help reinforce the importance of this.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight that the Supervisor view in Agent Activity view includes a Coaching Compliance widget. This provides a breakdown of coaching appointments by Overdue, Invalid, and Upcoming statuses. It's designed to help supervisors stay on top of sessions that may need action, so if your supervisors are not already using it, it might offer a little help while we work toward broader improvements.

The issue around scheduling artefacts ("on queue" segments) when a coaching session is moved or canceled is also a really interesting point. There's definitely a push and pull here between supervisors, who are trying to meet coaching needs, and schedulers, who are trying to maintain a clean and accurate schedule. Thank you for putting this onto our radar - it's something I'll be looking into further.

We would absolutely welcome any more ideas you have while keeping both perspectives (supervisors and schedulers) in mind. Your input is incredibly helpful as we continue to evolve these features.

Cheers,

Thank you for bringing this up! We've encountered an inconvenience around this, too. For our company, a supervisor creates the coaching, and should someone call out sick, a different person from scheduling team overwrites that day's schedule with the callout activity code. If someone calls out on Monday, for instance, and there's a coaching scheduled for that day, I've found that after I've coded the full day as out sick, the supervisor later cancels or moves the coaching, and this creates a small "on queue" segment on the sick person's Monday schedule, in the spot where the coaching used to be. I've tried deleting the coaching segment from the agent, and also from their supervisor's Genesys schedule, before marking them out sick for the day, and that doesn't fix it. Once the supervisor moves or cancels the coaching, we get that "on queue" segment again. Since I pull reports on how many hours of unscheduled absence people have, I can't leave that there, so I've taken to reaching out to supervisors every time someone calls out on a coaching day, to have the sup update the coaching first, before I update the agent's schedule to indicate they were out. Your suggestion is an interesting one, I'd love if Genesys could come up with some way to simplify updating absences that fall on the same day as a coaching! 

Hi all,

Our business is really enjoying the recent feature "schedule a coaching session" and have been using this process regularly to develop our agents with a session booked in every week.

One slight gripe though....

If the agent is calling in sick for their shift, team leaders and senior agents have the ability to simply override that agents shift in the roster with the "SICK" activity code.

What this then does if said agent has/had a coaching session previously booked during that shift, is whilst it does "invalidate" the session in the agents development page, for the facilitator, there is no notification and the coaching session still appears for them in the roster. 

WFM or the Leadership Team are then having to go into the agents development page and "delete" the coaching session.

One thought would be, could there be a failsafe whereby the agents status is unable to be altered without deleting the coaching session first?

I.e, if the agent phones in and says that they are not going to make it in for their shift, whoever goes to update the schedule (senior agent or team leader) wont be able to update the agent to "Sick" without deleting the coaching session first?

Alternatively, perhaps having an instant notification sent to the facilitator and/or WFM that said something along the lines of "Coaching session for XX (Agent name) has been invalidated. Click here to delete or reschedule"?

Just a thought....

Kind Regards

Adam Strang

Hi all,

Our business is really enjoying the recent feature "schedule a coaching session" and have been using this process regularly to develop our agents with a session booked in every week.

One slight gripe though....

If the agent is calling in sick for their shift, team leaders and senior agents have the ability to simply override that agents shift in the roster with the "SICK" activity code.

What this then does if said agent has/had a coaching session previously booked during that shift, is whilst it does "invalidate" the session in the agents development page, for the facilitator, there is no notification and the coaching session still appears for them in the roster. 

WFM or the Leadership Team are then having to go into the agents development page and "delete" the coaching session.

One thought would be, could there be a failsafe whereby the agents status is unable to be altered without deleting the coaching session first?

I.e, if the agent phones in and says that they are not going to make it in for their shift, whoever goes to update the schedule (senior agent or team leader) wont be able to update the agent to "Sick" without deleting the coaching session first?

Alternatively, perhaps having an instant notification sent to the facilitator and/or WFM that said something along the lines of "Coaching session for XX (Agent name) has been invalidated. Click here to delete or reschedule"?

Just a thought....

Kind Regards

Adam Strang

"This is an ongoing issue that we have also experienced. Our only workaround is to instruct supervisors not to override or cancel the coaching sessions and to allow the WFM team to make these changes to avoid negatively impacting the schedules. We have also submitted a few ideas to help resolve this issue and other related issues that may arise on the coaching tab."

Hi all,

Our business is really enjoying the recent feature "schedule a coaching session" and have been using this process regularly to develop our agents with a session booked in every week.

One slight gripe though....

If the agent is calling in sick for their shift, team leaders and senior agents have the ability to simply override that agents shift in the roster with the "SICK" activity code.

What this then does if said agent has/had a coaching session previously booked during that shift, is whilst it does "invalidate" the session in the agents development page, for the facilitator, there is no notification and the coaching session still appears for them in the roster. 

WFM or the Leadership Team are then having to go into the agents development page and "delete" the coaching session.

One thought would be, could there be a failsafe whereby the agents status is unable to be altered without deleting the coaching session first?

I.e, if the agent phones in and says that they are not going to make it in for their shift, whoever goes to update the schedule (senior agent or team leader) wont be able to update the agent to "Sick" without deleting the coaching session first?

Alternatively, perhaps having an instant notification sent to the facilitator and/or WFM that said something along the lines of "Coaching session for XX (Agent name) has been invalidated. Click here to delete or reschedule"?

Just a thought....

Kind Regards

Adam Strang