Workforce Engagement Management

Hi everyone!  Looking for some advice here.  Genesys Cloud has made some large strides since we first launched in 2023 and with the Capacity Planning feature being released, I'm not sure our current BU/Planning Group set up is still optimal. Here is some specifics on our set-up:

Planning Groups - These are currently set up by bulk call type and then by language and then call or callback.  For one BU, we currently have 28 Planning Groups.  

Staffing Groups - We use our Staffing Groups to allow us to better manage time off.  This is what prevents us from having too many openers or too many closers off, for example. 

IN order to use Capacity Planner, the Staffing Groups have to be associated to the Planning Groups.  There is a limit of 10 associations. I am confused as to how to associate my Staffing Groups to the Planning Groups, appropriately.  My Staffing Groups are NOT language specific but rather time of day based because the Staffing Groups are used to compensate for the fact that the Time Off Limits are not granular enough. 

Any guidance would be appreciated.

#Workforce Management
#Forecasting

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Gina Palmer
Manager, Workforce Management
Papa, Inc.
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Hi Gina - 

I've started working through best practices for capacity planning and staffing groups myself, so I will be following this thread with great interest. 

As for staffing groups, one thing you can do is build out one group of staffing groups for time off planning (which you already have), and another group of staffings specifically for cap planning.  These staffing groups you would not load agents into. 

Adding agents to a SG for cap planning purposes, only informs the headcount, which then prepopulates the starting FTE with the headcount number from your SG's.  If you do not include agents in your SG, there will just be an additional step in your cap planning of manually inputting the starting FTE.

As for SG associations, this is something that I am still unclear on and hoping next week's webinar will shed some additional light on.

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Russell Donald
InflowCX
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Hi Gina, great question.  I'll try to help with some guidance.  

RE Staffing Groups:  Our longer term vision is that you can use the same staffing group configuraiton for things like time-off limits and capacity planning, however today since the time off limits are daily you have to break out your SGs by shift or time of day which is probably not how you want to do your capacity planning since in most cases your capacity plan would be more rolled up.  There are two things here that may help.  First, we have a roadmap item on the time off side that will allow you to set limits by hour instead of day.  This would help to enable you to use a single staffing group vs. a different SG by shift (at least to some extent).  Secondly there is a work around you can use right now to go ahead and use Capacity Planning.  As Russell Donald mentioned in his reply below, right now the only thing the staffing group does in capacity planning today (aside from the PG associations) is to inform your starting headcount.  So if you create separate SGs for Capacity Planning with no agents in them to use for Cap Planning, the only take away would be that you need to enter your starting FTE manually vs. using the headcount from a SG.  I hope this makes sense.  So if you did this you would create "dummy" SGs just for capacity planning, set up your PG associations there and NOT set up PG associations for the SGs you use for time off limits.  Let me know if you have questions about this work around and I'd be happy to help further.

In terms of the 10 limit within the associations, this means that we only allow (initially) 10 types of work (PGs) to be shared by up to 10 groups of agents (SGs).  You can have as many sets of associations in the BU as you want, but each set can only be up to 10x10.  

So where i'd start on your configuration would be to ask if you want to long term / capacity plan for all of the agents in your BU to handle all 28 PGs.  Is this what you want to plan for?  Or, perhaps, do some groups of agents handle some of the PGs and other groups of agents hand other of the PGs (again, for planning purposes, not intraday backups etc).  So maybe in reality you might have 3 groups of staff who each handle 9 PGs.  If this was the case you might have 9PGs to 1 SG (association A) and then 9 different PGs to a different SG (association B) and then the remaining 10 PGs to a third SG (association C).  Basically you only want to map PGs to SGs in an association if you want to plan for that SG to handle all of those PGS.

If your agents actually handle all 28 PGs (for long term planning purposes) then you would be over our initial 10x10 limits and this would mean that it might be beneficial to collapse some of the PGs together, however you need to make sure that this won't impact the scheduling side in terms of agent matching/qualification to handle a PG.  

I hope this helps some, but if you have other questions please reply and let me know and I'll try to assist.

Thank you,

Chris Johnson

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Christopher Johnson
Director PM
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