Genesys Cloud - Main

Our agents handle calls and emails at the same time, and we've set Genesys to allow calls to interrupt emails. We found this setup to lead to uneven assignment of calls across agents in some cases. An extreme example is agents A and B are on the same queue, but agent A has an email interaction open, while agent B does not. If we have only few calls coming in, they will always be assigned to agent B, so at the end of the day, agent B might have handled 10-20 calls, and agent A none. This is because for agent A, the "time since last interaction" is always 0, as they have a running interaction.

This extreme case has happened a few times. What happens more often is that statistically, agents that handle emails will get less calls than those that don't. 

Do you also have this issue? Are there any ways to only consider interactions on certain channels when calculating the time since last interaction (most likely not).

We are considering the following alternatives:

1. Completely split email from telephony, so agents only work on one channel at once. This way the calls are distributed "fairly" among agents, but it also means that any free time between calls has to be spent on work outside Genesys (which defeats the purpose of Genesys)
2. Don't allow calls to interrupt mails. This means however that callers may wait very long in the queue, as handling a complex email may take a couple of hours.

Do you see any other way of improving the situation? Thank you for any ideas.

#Routing(ACD/IVR)

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Andrei Socaciu
Architect
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Hi Andrei, You could test Utilization Labels to separate voice and digital capacity. This should help keep agents available for voice calls even when they're working on digital interactions.
That said, I wouldn't expect Utilization Labels alone to fix the call balancing issue, because they don't change how routing priority works.
For better distribution, it might make sense to split the agents into two groups:
- Voice-focused agents
- Blended agents
Then voice calls would go to the voice-focused group first, with blended agents acting as overflow.
So basically, Utilization Labels can help with availability, but the routing/group strategy should have a bigger impact on call distribution.

Hi Andrei,

Following this post as I find it quite interesting.

My understanding is that allowing calls to interrupt emails makes agents eligible to receive voice interactions, but the queue routing evaluation method may still influence which eligible agent receives the interaction.

I wonder whether the behavior you're seeing is related to the routing method and how metrics such as "time since last interaction" are being evaluated when agents have long-running email interactions.

Interested to hear other thoughts on this as well.