Fair question @Tyler Merk, and yes, your use of Emergency Groups is like most of ours, except when the lines need to be down and follow the emergency flow for an extended period of time. Given we have a plethora of lines of business that don't all follow a single schedule, schedule groups, etc, we do very similar things with respect to data table lookups and schedule group checks for normal operations; however, those capabilities require some advanced programming (which some of us are blessed to have access to), become hard/tedious to manage at scale for exception events, and even have their limits (e.g. you can only create so many schedules/schedule groups/table entries even after having the limits increased.)
The point of the idea I referenced above is to simply offer a date/timestamp feature on the emergency group so admins/ops leaders don't have to log back into Genesys at random times of day or after hours to find the emergency group and deactivate it, especially if they knew when they planned to end the emergency. For example, when we were activating the emergency group for the hundreds of clinics across America impacted by the storm, most of them said they would be ready to today or tomorrow. It would've been nice when activating those (i.e. already in the feature) or if we went back into them after activating them, if we could specify an end date/time for those sites that specified one. Otherwise, yes, the Emergency Groups are nothing more than a kill switch we have to go back into at whatever time of day/night to deactivate.
To my earlier point and yours, yes we could build tables, special flows, and some form of weather related schedules, but why do that when we literally have the Emergency Group. The addition of a "specify start/end date/time" or "always on" feature would truly round out the Emergency Group feature. Seems like a fair ask for Genesys to consider, especially for those not as talented/resourceful as you & others to build something custom for emergency situations.
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Brian T. Jones | Ascension | Senior Specialist - Technology
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-27-2026 08:50
From: Tyler Merk
Subject: Emergency Schedule Calendaring (Set Start/End Date & Time)
Brian,
Not quite sure I understand how your org uses the emergency group function today. For us, we use it in the event of a last minute emergency (power outage, water main break, ISP issue, etc). We activate the emergency group until we get an all clear that the practice is safe to return to normal phone operations.
Outside of that, we leverage a data table where we store all of our routing information for each practice. We use a schedule group and a schedule substatus that uses a contains phrase search for certain treatment of calls, ex. (Meeting, Lunch, etc), we also capture whether the status is open, closed, or holiday. We then append that "reason" to the DID to perform our data table lookup, this allows us the flexibility to define how we want different situations to be handled and schedule them.
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Tyler Merk
NA Bon Secours Mercy Health
tmerk@mercy.com
Original Message:
Sent: 01-26-2026 08:39
From: Brian Jones
Subject: Emergency Schedule Calendaring (Set Start/End Date & Time)
As a good portion of the United States is either bracing for, in the middle of, or coming out of Winter Storm Fern, I thought it might be a good opportunity to throw Idea CERTNG-I-1996 (which fortunately is currently marked as 'Community Feedback Requested' instead of 'Future Consideration' or 'Will Not Implement') on your radars in hopes we can rally around improving the Emergency Group feature.
Although the "fixers" in all of us might try to build our own code, leverage data tables, or even build a plethora of "emergency schedules" for each schedule group (which has its limits), that seems a bit unnecessary if a simple "Never Ends" or "Date/Time picker" were available within the Emergency Group feature.
Those who use the Emergency Groups feature globally (for whatever reason) certainly appreciate the consideration!
#ArchitectandDesign
#Routing(ACD/IVR)
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Brian T. Jones | Ascension | Senior Specialist - Technology
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