I've been sharing my top picks for each month's releases since I became a Moderator for the Community in August. If you haven't seen my previous top picks, I would highly recommend taking a peek at my previous posts.

As a holiday parting gift to you, I wanted to go back to the first half of this year and help highlight some of my favorite releases so that can enjoy some features that I think shouldn't be overlooked.

January: Please Hold the Hold Music

When I was first hired at Genesys, I was part of the Telephony team who investigated call issues. One of the things that the Telephony team investigates are call quality issues where we need to determine which side of the call had audio issues and where and how it could be fixed. If you have listened in on hundreds of calls like I have, you have heard the default Genesys hold music a lot.

To my delight, "Suppress Recording While Call is on Hold" was released on Jan 24, 2024. This new feature  allowed administrators to disable call recordings when a call is placed on hold. For instance, if a customer called in and an agent needed to put them on a brief hold for 5 minutes, the call recording would pause during that time so upon review of the call, a supervisor would not need to scrub through the duration of the hold music. This helped significantly cut down to the amount of time that admins and supervisors would need to listen to when listening back to a conversation for an evaluation.

As an additional fun fact, the default hold music that Genesys provides was performed by the wife of one of our internal developers at the time. She played the oboe in a quintet for the piece, and I think at one point George Ganahl had the original CD that featured that song.

February: Consult or Conference in Confidence

I promise that not all of these release highlights will be related to phone calls, but during my time with the Telephony team I had cases where customers asked when ACD conferencing would be a feature in Genesys. I have to give credit to the 331 votes that helped bring ACD Conferencing to life. Released on Feb 28, 2024, this new feature allows agents to add up to 20 different participants to the ACD call. Previously, agents were limited when making consult calls so this has been a huge improvement.

Have any of you hit the 20 participant limit yet?

March: They Don't Even Go Here (Any More)

With Collaborate in Genesys Cloud, I am easily able to spin up a group chat with any number of my colleagues at the click of a button. During my tenure, I created plenty of group chats that ranged from specific chats about issues that we were investigating, to a place to share pictures of our pets. I know on one occasion, a coworker of mine accidentally added the wrong Alex to the group chat when discussing a case we were working on. Luckily they were just on another related team, but my coworker had no way of removing Alex from the chat so unfortunately they had a couple of extra :loudspeaker: emoji alerts in their notifications until they left the group chat.

That was until the introduction of "Remove users from Collaborate chat rooms". Now, you can remove users for the chatrooms as needed, instead of kindly asking them to leave. This not only removes the users access to the chat, but it also removes the visibility of the chatroom from the UI.

Now you don't have to worry about accidentally adding John the CEO to your chat when you meant to add John from your team.

April: Genesys Does Not Fool Around With Data Privacy

One of my favorite things about working at Genesys is their commitment to data security and privacy. If you haven't checked it out, I would highly recommend that you take a look at our Security and Compliance section in the Resource Center. With the introduction of GDPR, CCPA, and any other data privacy laws that are enacted, Genesys strives to make sure that organizations have options to limit the amount of data that agents and supervisors can see. With Analytics data masking options, admins are now able to use the data masking options in Genesys Cloud to mask and unmask sensitive information withing the Analytics Workspace views. This feature, released on Apr 22, 2024, allows administrators to get the right amount of information in front of the right people.

May: Spring Cleaning and Categorizing

At the end of May, we rolled out Interaction categories for interaction analysis. If you haven't tried this feature yet, you have really been missing out. Interaction Categories are a great way to add small descriptors to interaction summaries. These categories can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be, so I highly recommend that you check out the Resource Center article for Interaction Categories for a brief demonstration of how you can set up Interaction Categories today!

June: Who Else Has A Copy?

Let's say you have an incoming class of new hires and you want to show them what an ideal interaction would look like. One of the great things about revisiting past interactions in Genesys Cloud is that you can download the recorded audio to use for training purposes. However, you may want to make sure that only verified users are able to download the call recordings. In the past, the events in the Audit Trail were not as clear as to who accessed the interaction or when the audio was downloaded.

With 172 votes in the Product Ideas Lab, Enhancement to Recording audit was released as a full fledged feature at the end of July. This change helped distinguish between logging when a user accesses the interaction, as well as recording who is saving an offline copy of the interaction and when.

July: Stacked In Your Favor

July was by far one of the busiest months in terms of our feature releases. For instance, we saw the release of Operational Console, Architect Replay Mode, and updates to the screen recording capabilities of Genesys Cloud Background Assistant, just to name a few. I could write quite a lot on each of these new releases, but I wanted to highlight one release that differs with everyone else's current top pick.

It's Genesys Agent Copilot! It is there to help guide your agents to the next best action during an interaction. It can recommend scripts and canned responses, quickly search and summarize knowledge base suggestions, and even summarize the interaction and suggest a wrap-up code once the interaction has concluded. This new feature is a time saver and can help cut down on onboarding time, average handle time, and after-call work.

The Agent Copilot helps remove the headache of getting into the correct system or finding the one piece of helpful information in several paragraphs or pages of documentation.

Honorable Mention

I want to give a shout out to a process change that affects all feature releases as my honorable mention. Last year, we used to release new features beginning Wednesday morning in select regions, and completed the rollout across all regions by Friday morning. While that seemed fine on paper, some deployment weeks did not go so well. Those issues could then be exacerbated by the fact that a feature was rolled just before the weekend and everyone is short staffed during the Saturday and Sunday shifts. Effective March 4, 2024, we adjusted the deployment schedule to happen earlier in the week, beginning Mondays and concluding by end of the day on Wednesdays. This not only allows our Dev team the time to make any corrective changes before the weekend, but also gives our customers the time to test out these new features before getting some well-deserved rest over the weekend.

#JasonsTopPicks

#Unsure/Other

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Jason Kleitz
Online Community Manager/Moderator
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