Skills routing with Genesys

[Frank Amodio]

We are about to pick a CTI vendor(Genesys is in the lead). We have a Nortel 81c at our main site and plan to add another 81c to a second site. We plan to have a virtual call center with skills based routing. I understand that Nortel doesn't allow CTI products the ability to route to a postion ID. My question, is there a way to do skills based routing thru the Genesys platform? If yes, what are any obstacles that need to be over coming to do this? Any feedback on Skills routing from Genesys would be appreciated.

[JLeithead]

It is true the current release of Nortel does not support third party CTI routing to the ACD key 0. You can with IR, route to the personal extention which works fine. There are some considerations you must take in stride with respect to setting up department mailboxes and building call treatment, as well as learning the idiosyncrasies of IR and the change it will introduce to the CSR's. The good news is... X11 R.26 for Meridian will expose the necessary code to allow routing to the ACD key. This is due, I believe in the 2Q 2001. Hope this helps a bit.
Should you make a Genesys decision... you will be pleased with the product. Don't get me wrong... you will have some problems, but they will be fewer than with other products.
Good luck!
EMail me if you want to discuss this further.
John

[Victor]

Frank,

to put it simply you will not need to do anything fancy in order to do skillased routing. As long as you have an extension and a position defined for each agent (you will have to define it even if you would not use CTI system), Genesys makes skillased routing rather simple.

In your particular scenario where you have two switches, from a Genesys perspective, you will need the following products (at the most minimum):

TServer, Stat Server, and IR Server to succesfully perform the skill based routing. You will also need to purchase two external outer licenses (please someone correct me if I am wrong on it!)

Skill outing itself is rather simple, and I think is one of the best features of Genesys I have seen so far. The fact that you are using Meridian will only make your life easier, because from the very beginning Genesys was designed for Meridian.

We have been using it on most of our customer sites, and compared to the Agent Group routing, it decreased waitinqueue time by an average of 10 to 15 percent.

I think you should heed John's warning though it does sound very nice and everything, but there are too many tiny little things that will creep up, with which you will have to deal onafly. Be prepared to spend few numerous nights trying to figure out what is going on, but overall, putting the time required to register all the agents aside, and assuming that your switches are connected correctly, I am pretty sure that you can implement the skillased routing in less than a week if you know what you are doing.

If you don't, and will be learning as you go along god help you! But still, a timeline of one month would be sufficient enough, in my opinion. Just, please make sure that your skillsystem is really thought out well enough to support future extensions.

What MLink version are you using? Or it is a symposium link?

In regards to ACD or Extension routing John is right, you cannot route to a position with most of the current release versions. this will present a problem if your agents will also be placing calls to other agents. You will need to make sure that this does not happen.

Cheers,
Vic

[Frank Amodio]

Thanks for the feedback, we are current on release 25 and have meridian link for our main site and we are required by Nortel to use Symposium link with the new purchase of the 81c for our second site. What is problem if your agents are placing calls to other agents? Does this affect calls that are transfered from one agent to another with a screen pop?

[Akiko Negishi]

Hello Frank, how are you? We did not find any connectivity problems between MLink and Symposium. BUT, Symposium TServer had few bugs which were fixed in a later Symposium release. So, please make sure that you are using the latest version!

One thing to keep in mind Symposium TServer does not support REGISTERALL DN, thus requiring you to register EACH and EVERY DN you will be using. Before, TServer was receiving DNs that were not registered, but this is no longer the case. I think Victor mentioned something about SymposiumMLink compatibility earlier in this forum.

I hope it helped you,
A!

[JLeithead]

If you need to transfer to a specific agent you will still transfer direct to their ext#... however you may want to reengineer your process to have IR transfer calls to a skill set rather than an individual. Take a good look at the current intercall centre interactions and you may find an opportunity to use the Genesys tools to make significant gains. For example... common transfers from area to area could be enhanced by adding a list box and softphone to your desktop application to allow a CSR to select where to transfer a call.
John

[Kim]

I would like to add few more notes to what have been said so far.
From placing call to one agent to another, you will not have any problems with it with or without screen popup. The only thing you will have to worry is placing calls between agents on two different switches.

Genesys does not have any ability to tell you if the tielines between two switches are near or at their maximum capacity. This means when IR will try to place a call to an agent on a separate switch and all the lines are busy, a caller will be dropped by the switch. You will have to think about how to prevent this from happening. I think it is one of the really weak points of Genesys.
I hope it helps!!!