Genesys Cloud - Main

Good day and Happy New Year!

As part of my New Year Spring Cleaning, I have been going through my email backlog that has included all the various updates from the Aha! Ideas site. I have seen a common theme which needs addressing.

Time and again, we see Ideas (in all statuses) where the most recent Admin update is months, or even years old. These Ideas often have multiple requests from customers for an update, yet none appears to be forthcoming,

I know this has been discussed before, but it is something that the Genesys Product Management team really need to deal with. I know you are all busy people, but is it too much to ask that updates are regularly posted and questions responded to?

As a minimum, I would expect that any Idea that is being actively worked on would get a monthly update. I have seen some Ideas which are "In Development" where the most recent Admin response is from early last year giving an anticipated release date of "End of Year". Well, it's now past the end of the year and... crickets! I would also like to see estimated dates for Beta Release and GA posted and updated. (Once in development, "2024" is not really acceptable!)

Additionally, questions / comments need responding to - I assume the relevant PM gets the same emailed notification of an update to the Idea that we do?

Of course, this does not address the other elephant in the room - what is the prioritization process? There are Ideas with dozens, sometimes hundreds of votes that seem to be going nowhere (and without explanation) yet others that garner little interest get fast-tracked.

As we approach the EOL of PureConnect, many of these Ideas relate to features available in the product that have yet to appear in Genesys Cloud. (This is despite the requests in some cases being years old.) I assume that Genesys want existing PureConnect customers to migrate to Genesys Cloud? How can they when features they rely on are not there? (Agent Greetings, Transfer to a Flow, limit ability to transfer to certain queues, to name just a few.) If you are not planning on implementing these, please at least explain why. We need to know what direction the product is actually taking (and when) so we can advise our customers and users. Vague "it's on the roadmap for sometime in the next year" just don't cut it, I'm afraid.

OK, that's it. So, Product Managers, care to comment?

Rant over.

#Roadmap/NewFeatures

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Paul Simpson
Views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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Hey Paul, I'm sure you've seen my comments on this same subject before so I'm behind you 100%.  My pet peeve is when updates seem to just be mumbo jumbo catch phrases or what seems an obvious copy and paste because the wording is almost verbatim to how another PM has responded to an unrelated idea (don't have examples of this at the moment but I'm sure we've all seen it).

Sadly, but in defence of some PMs, I've had at least one admit to me that there are issues in the aha platform itself where in some scenarios PMs aren't even getting notified of our comments.  So it's not always a case of us being ignored, but faults with the ideas portal.

I'm sure there's enough of us out there that would volunteer if Genesys wanted a work group/committee formed?  Maybe even a case of having one of the guys in the community with way better standing than me (Robert WC, or even yourself) be a "community representative" at product meetings to give input?

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Vaun McCarthy
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So say we all.

I'm tired of hearing once we have something to share, or once the dates are known etc then we will provide an update.

Having said that I do think that some PMs are much better than others in this regard, some do a pretty good job of keeping us updated, it is just feels like they are the exception not the rule.

Certainly an idea with 1 vote, i'm not expecting updates on every quarter. However anything that has I don't know 50+? 100+? Votes should at minimum get a regular, maybe quarterly update regardless of status as there is keen interest from customers, even if that update is we are waiting on these ideas / features to be released with eta of x before we can begin work on this etc. 

Anything in development also should have at at minimum quarterly updates. 

Anything with up coming development with less than the above threshold could be 6 months etc. 

Whatever it is, there needs to be clear expectations of this is how often updates will be provided based on status and number of votes. And if this is adhered to I think we would see less people asking for updates because we would know when to expect them.

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Anton Vroon
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Thanks to both of you for responding and for your support. I kinda figured who would be likely to respond, but didn't want to put words in your mouths by tagging anyone!

If there are issue with the Aha platform, then these need to be publicly acknowledged and addressed. Additionally, if these are known, then surely the PMs should be actively monitoring the site, rather than waiting for notifications that don't come? Even so, this only explains why comments go unanswered, it does not deal with why regular updates are not provided for active development projects.

I agree that there should be a defined expectation for update frequency, however in a landscape as rapidly changing as this, I would suggest that quarterly is far to infrequent. Anything in active development should get monthly, if not bi-weekly updates! They must have progress meetings for these projects, I don't think that adding updating the corresponding Idea to the workflow is too much to ask.

Let me be clear. I don't blame any of the individual PMs here. As you have noted, there is some variation in the "quality" of the updates. This indicates to me a lack of leadership and clear direction from their management. I believe Genesys as a whole should set a policy on this, publish that policy and actively monitor and promote it.

Heh ho, let's see if any of the PM team weigh in on this.

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Paul Simpson
Views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
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I was just thinking this same thing,as I saw a comment on an idea saying, "ETA?"  I remember waiting on the callback release and there were several people asking for an update and I commented that I could not believe that after us begging for an update, there was no response.   Thanks for this note.

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Judy Jimenez, Call Center Operations Manager
CURE Auto Insurance
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-08-2024 07:34
From: Paul Simpson
Subject: Possibly controversial rant about the Ideas site

Thanks to both of you for responding and for your support. I kinda figured who would be likely to respond, but didn't want to put words in your mouths by tagging anyone!

If there are issue with the Aha platform, then these need to be publicly acknowledged and addressed. Additionally, if these are known, then surely the PMs should be actively monitoring the site, rather than waiting for notifications that don't come? Even so, this only explains why comments go unanswered, it does not deal with why regular updates are not provided for active development projects.

I agree that there should be a defined expectation for update frequency, however in a landscape as rapidly changing as this, I would suggest that quarterly is far to infrequent. Anything in active development should get monthly, if not bi-weekly updates! They must have progress meetings for these projects, I don't think that adding updating the corresponding Idea to the workflow is too much to ask.

Let me be clear. I don't blame any of the individual PMs here. As you have noted, there is some variation in the "quality" of the updates. This indicates to me a lack of leadership and clear direction from their management. I believe Genesys as a whole should set a policy on this, publish that policy and actively monitor and promote it.

Heh ho, let's see if any of the PM team weigh in on this.

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Paul Simpson
Views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
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...to all of the comments thus far. By no coincidence, we were just having the same exact head-scratching discussion last week.

At the top of our discussion was a need to understand the prioritization of administrative (and in many cases, small) usability feature requests over the larger, shiny bells & whistles. We like to think of them as lower-hanging, smaller fruit that would have a big, positive administrative & operational impact. To name a few from the lab:

• Filtering for interactions with screen recordings
• Making data tables searchable by ANY keyword or part of a keyword & not just the key field and the exact key name
• Ability to broadcast an announcement to all users
• Sorting all columns in views (or at least more than a single column, haha)
• Including language skill in bulk user import
• Agent greeting/welcome prompt

Oh, and yes, we do realize some customers have built workarounds or use APIs to do some of these things. However, let's be frank here--that's unreasonable to ask the other 99% to do in an effort to achieve parity with other tools (like PureConnect) that allow users to do many of these things within the Admin UI.

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Brian T. Jones | Ascension | Senior Specialist - Technology
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