Genesys Cloud - Main

Moving our main Call Center to cloud this year and we are building out our most complicated IVR now....Want to make sure we start on the right foot.  Willing to accept any suggestions but which is better practice:
-  option 1:  Build out 2 flows (one for staging, one for production). I see only advantage here simplicity in flow, but would have to redo all work from staging flow to prod for updates.
-  option 2:  Single Flow, but use DNIS as variable lookup to decide if production number or staging number.  Advantage single flow, disadvantage, seems to be we will have a ton of these dnis checks and could get messy.  

Any other thoughts out there?   TIA
#Ask Me Anything (AMA)
#ArchitectureandDesign
#Implementation
#Routing(ACD/IVR)
#Telephony

------------------------------
Clayton Curtis
Enova Online Services, Inc.
------------------------------

Hello Clayton,

I would take the first option. You can always export staigng flow to a file and import it to production flow.


------------------------------
Wojciech Dzikowski
CGI ISMC Polska Sp. z o.o.
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 03-29-2022 09:31
From: Clayton Curtis
Subject: Best Practice? Prod vs Staging flow in Architect

Moving our main Call Center to cloud this year and we are building out our most complicated IVR now....Want to make sure we start on the right foot.  Willing to accept any suggestions but which is better practice:
-  option 1:  Build out 2 flows (one for staging, one for production). I see only advantage here simplicity in flow, but would have to redo all work from staging flow to prod for updates.
-  option 2:  Single Flow, but use DNIS as variable lookup to decide if production number or staging number.  Advantage single flow, disadvantage, seems to be we will have a ton of these dnis checks and could get messy.

Any other thoughts out there?   TIA
#Ask Me Anything (AMA)
#ArchitectureandDesign
#Implementation
#Routing(ACD/IVR)
#Telephony

------------------------------
Clayton Curtis
Enova Online Services, Inc.
------------------------------

​Hi Clayton,
We have a fairly complicated IVR and we use two different flows: one for testing and one for prod.  There are a couple of advantages to this.  1.)  if you're looking to make a change to the flow you can do so in the test region without affecting live data or customers.  2.)  if you do make a change and it turns out there are errors, you can always remove the changes to match what you have in your production flow.  3.) You can troubleshoot or play around with the design to try out new features/flows without affecting production.
The disadvantage is you have two sets of flows to keep current.
Having a DNIS variable look up to decide if it is a production number or a staging number is interesting.  We just bought separate phone numbers and pointed each to their respective flows.

------------------------------
nichole conway
State of Missouri - Family Support Division
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 03-29-2022 09:31
From: Clayton Curtis
Subject: Best Practice? Prod vs Staging flow in Architect

Moving our main Call Center to cloud this year and we are building out our most complicated IVR now....Want to make sure we start on the right foot.  Willing to accept any suggestions but which is better practice:
-  option 1:  Build out 2 flows (one for staging, one for production). I see only advantage here simplicity in flow, but would have to redo all work from staging flow to prod for updates.
-  option 2:  Single Flow, but use DNIS as variable lookup to decide if production number or staging number.  Advantage single flow, disadvantage, seems to be we will have a ton of these dnis checks and could get messy.

Any other thoughts out there?   TIA
#Ask Me Anything (AMA)
#ArchitectureandDesign
#Implementation
#Routing(ACD/IVR)
#Telephony

------------------------------
Clayton Curtis
Enova Online Services, Inc.
------------------------------

Hi Clayton,

We have a very complicated IVR as well. I agree with @Nichole Conway advice of having a version for each environment. Which that said however, when working on larger enhancements it is a lot of extra programming work and testing to apply the changes to each version manually. We have an Integration version, a Staging version and a Production version. I just finished an enhancement where I decided to manually apply the application changes to each version, instead of copying the flow from one environment to the other (which also requires changes). This caused 4-6 hours of manual coding per environment, and then 5-7 hours of testing per environment (60 test calls per environment). 

If you go with a version for each environment, I would strongly suggest that you leverage data tables and common modules to assist with environment stuff... ie... look up to a data table to get the environment variables associated with the DNIS, pass the environment variables to the common modules, where they do they work based on what was passed in. Our flows were built before common modules, so we don't have this. It has been a bummer, causing us extra time and work.

Hope this helps,
Jackie​​

Hi Clayton,

As your call center moving to Genesys Cloud, considering 1st option from your post is good(only my perspective). However, to duplicate the flows with prod or stg or lab might be easy to handle with CD CI, Terraform, and Archy developer tools. I found the useful video on Genesys developer center, it might help you understand how to use it, how it is going to simplify the problem of re-doing the work while we move our flows to one environment to other. 

https://developer.dev-genesys.cloud/video/

On the first tab, when we expand you can find the nice videos with the tag lines :
Exporting Architect Flows with Archy
Importing an Architect Flow using Archy

Hope this will give you some idea on how to deal with our repetitive tasks, streamline the rollouts with miner human interventions.

Thanks,
Ramu

------------------------------
Ramu P
Global Technology Solutions, LLC
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 03-30-2022 12:44
From: Jackie Maher
Subject: Best Practice? Prod vs Staging flow in Architect

Hi Clayton,

We have a very complicated IVR as well. I agree with @Nichole Conway advice of having a version for each environment. Which that said however, when working on larger enhancements it is a lot of extra programming work and testing to apply the changes to each version manually. We have an Integration version, a Staging version and a Production version. I just finished an enhancement where I decided to manually apply the application changes to each version, instead of copying the flow from one environment to the other (which also requires changes). This caused 4-6 hours of manual coding per environment, and then 5-7 hours of testing per environment (60 test calls per environment).

If you go with a version for each environment, I would strongly suggest that you leverage data tables and common modules to assist with environment stuff... ie... look up to a data table to get the environment variables associated with the DNIS, pass the environment variables to the common modules, where they do they work based on what was passed in. Our flows were built before common modules, so we don't have this. It has been a bummer, causing us extra time and work.

Hope this helps,
Jackie​​

------------------------------
Jackie Maher
Further

Original Message:
Sent: 03-30-2022 08:11
From: nichole conway
Subject: Best Practice? Prod vs Staging flow in Architect

​Hi Clayton,
We have a fairly complicated IVR and we use two different flows: one for testing and one for prod.  There are a couple of advantages to this.  1.)  if you're looking to make a change to the flow you can do so in the test region without affecting live data or customers.  2.)  if you do make a change and it turns out there are errors, you can always remove the changes to match what you have in your production flow.  3.) You can troubleshoot or play around with the design to try out new features/flows without affecting production.
The disadvantage is you have two sets of flows to keep current.
Having a DNIS variable look up to decide if it is a production number or a staging number is interesting.  We just bought separate phone numbers and pointed each to their respective flows.

------------------------------
nichole conway
State of Missouri - Family Support Division

Original Message:
Sent: 03-29-2022 09:31
From: Clayton Curtis
Subject: Best Practice? Prod vs Staging flow in Architect

Moving our main Call Center to cloud this year and we are building out our most complicated IVR now....Want to make sure we start on the right foot.  Willing to accept any suggestions but which is better practice:
-  option 1:  Build out 2 flows (one for staging, one for production). I see only advantage here simplicity in flow, but would have to redo all work from staging flow to prod for updates.
-  option 2:  Single Flow, but use DNIS as variable lookup to decide if production number or staging number.  Advantage single flow, disadvantage, seems to be we will have a ton of these dnis checks and could get messy.

Any other thoughts out there?   TIA
#Ask Me Anything (AMA)
#ArchitectureandDesign
#Implementation
#Routing(ACD/IVR)
#Telephony

------------------------------
Clayton Curtis
Enova Online Services, Inc.
------------------------------