How to check the status of a skill?

[pspenning]

Good Day everyone,
I am still getting my feet wet in Genesys coming from a heavy Avaya Vector world so I know there are many more ways to accomplish this.  Here's my scenario...

I would like to be able to check a particular skill occupancy to determine if a queue is "Open" or not.  i.e. Emergency, Holiday, etc.  If there are no agents logged into the Emergency Skill, there is no Emergency and calls proceed as normal.  Else they go to an emergency routing strategy.

How can I "Poll" the skill to see if there is anyone logged in to it?  Or would there be a better way to accomplish this same task?  One thought I had might be to set up a routing strategy that enables the manager to call a number and enter a code to turn on or off the emergency .  I would then write that value to a table and hit that table on each call coming into the strategy.  This would eliminate one more skill for no other purpose than emergency.  Any thoughts?  I appreciate the help!

Thanks,
Perry

[pdavid]

You should be able to do this via VAG (Virtual Agent Groups), and customize it (add formulas to sum up all active phones statuses) to get how many are logged in/waiting under that particular skill.

[pspenning]

Thanks...
I appreciate that.  I will give it a shot.

-Perry

[mark]

You can use SData within the routing strategy to poll an agent group, you may need to create a stat for logged in though.

Alternatively, you could create a DB that will do what you have suggested. This is essentially what we have done, it contains opening hours, adhoc hours, emergency closure. You can amend any of the values either by a Java front end, or by calling a GVP app. Calls then lookup the relevant tables when they enter the strategy.

Mark

[pspenning]

Thanks...
The more I think about this, I believe I am going to go the DB route.  It seems like it would be a bit more clean and I could reuse the data.

I appreciate the feedback.