Genesys Phone Skill Changes and WFM Impacts

[jamesw]

In the past we would change an agents phone skills rarely to meet business needs or handle a "stuck" call situation. We are starting to change these skills more often and actually have an initiative to cross train all of our agents. Which means a lot more changes, it appears that "moving" an agent to another department will delete their schedule in WFM (I think when the Intra-day rebuild is run).

Is there an easy way to keep WFM from deleting these schedules when the skills aren't the same as when the schedule was created?

[msh]

short answer no, its very annoying.

As I see it there are two options:

1. dont remove the skill but set the level to 0.
2. What we do, do not schedule based on actual skills but create a number of "shadow" WFM skills, that are then never removed from the agent.

[jamesw]

Option #1 is the "feature" that deletes an agents schedule. 
Option #2 sounds like the perfect solution. It's going to take some time and effort to transition, but it will be worth it if it works.
Thanks so much!

[Adam G]

Tip: be mindful that you will probably end up with 3 similar sets of Skills for routing, reporting and WfM.  It can get a bit complex to administer - which sort of negates using a central platform to configure everything in unison.

But that's Genesys. 

[Dionysis]

I would be talking to the business about not changing skills at all.  Doing this is really just a crutch to achieve something that should be done in a more automated way.

In a perfect world, you should only use skills to indicate what an agent is capable of, not which interactions you want them to take.  Then use skill levels and more intelligent routing to get the right interactions to the right agents at the right times.