Hello Community members
This week we're excited to introduce Unavailable Times, a significant enhancement designed to give agents more control over when they can and cannot work. Today, schedules are created based on work plans and forecasted demand - yet agents often have real-life commitments, personal needs, or occasional constraints that the system could not previously account for. This feature changes that.
Unavailable Times empowers agents by allowing them to directly record specific times they are unavailable, ensuring the scheduling process respects their personal circumstances while still enabling businesses to plan effectively. This doesn't just help avoid scheduling conflicts - it supports better work–life balance, aligns with regional requirements where employee-provided availability must be collected and honoured, and gives agents a voice in how their schedules are generated.
What This Feature Enables
With Unavailable Times, agents can:
- Indicate exactly when they are not able to work, up to 53 weeks in advance.
- Add notes to provide schedulers with helpful context.
- Validate their inputs before saving, so they understand how unavailable times impact their schedule.
- Work within clear constraints - WFM will never schedule shifts during times marked as unavailable.
- Benefit from schedules that better respect their personal time, leading to improved satisfaction and fewer conflicts.
For schedulers and administrators, this feature provides visibility into both the original unavailable times used when the schedule was generated and the latest saved unavailable times agents have entered since; supporting transparent decision-making and compliance needs.
Why This Matters
Unavailable Times helps organisations:
- Respect agent constraints: Schedules are generated around the times agents explicitly say they cannot work, supporting work-life balance and reducing avoidable scheduling issues.
- Empower agents: Agents have a clear, self-service method to communicate their needs without requiring manual interventions.
- Support regional compliance: In regions where employee availability must be collected and considered during schedule generation, this feature offers a compliant and auditable approach.
When Unavailable Times are enabled, these constraints are treated as hard constraints, even where they conflict with service goals. This ensures agent-defined boundaries are always respected during schedule creation.
Future Enhancements
We're already planning future enhancements to the warnings that the system gives to Agents
At the moment, in cases where Planning Periods don't align with the Business Unit's start day of week and an Agent adds unavailable times for the day immediately before or after the current week, the system might give warnings for weekly working days and/or paid time for the current week. We're planning to update this in the coming months so that the warning messages are always in the Agent time zone rather than the Business Unit time zone.
If this does happen, something that can be more pronounced where monthly Planning Periods are being used, Agents should:
• Address any other validation warnings first
• If the issue persists, navigate to the previous/next week, address the warnings there, and save.
• Navigate back to the current week and re-validate.
Learn More
Full documentation on using Unavailable Times - including step-by-step guidance for both agents and schedulers - is available here:
https://help.mypurecloud.com/articles/work-with-unavailable-times/
#ScheduleGeneration
#ScheduleManagement
#WFMConfiguration,BestPractices
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Andy Boland
Product Manager
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