Hello. I have designed contact center IVRs for 12 years. In legacy systems, we often hard-coded the business hours directly into the routing scripts. In Genesys Cloud Architect, I see the ‘Evaluate Schedule Group’ action. My client has very complex holidays that change every year, and they also have sudden weather emergencies. They want their operational managers to be able to close the IVR without asking my team to publish a new Architect flow. If I use the Evaluate Schedule Group action, can the client toggle emergency modes using the user interface without requiring Architect flow permissions? What is the best practice for this?
Oh, this is my absolute favorite feature! As a workforce coordinator, I am the one who always has to manage the schedules! Yes, you should absolutely use the Schedule Groups! You can create a specific Emergency Schedule and assign it to the Schedule Group. Then, all you have to do is give the operational managers the ‘Routing > Schedule > Edit’ permission! They do not need Architect permissions at all! When a snowstorm hits, they just log in, change the emergency schedule to cover the current time, and the Architect flow instantly sees it and routes to the closed message! It is so easy and saves us so much time!
I completely agree! From an operational strategy perspective, this is a massive win for business agility! We completely decentralized our emergency routing using exactly this method! We no longer have to wake up our IT engineers at 4 AM to change a routing script when there is a power outage. The business leaders can simply open the Genesys Cloud interface on their mobile browsers, update the schedule group, and immediately divert traffic to our backup outsourcers. It empowers the business unit to own their customer experience!
I design all the emergency routing for our clients and this is the standard method we use. However, I must give you one important technical warning. When your managers edit the schedule, they must remember that schedule groups evaluate in a top-down order.
You must put the Emergency schedule at the very top of your Schedule Group configuration. If you put the normal Business Hours schedule at the top, the system will match the business hours first and completely ignore the emergency toggle.
Always teach your managers to check the priority order when they activate the emergency.