New PureCloud Feature Manages Flow Routing During Holidays and Emergencies

The Genesys PureCloud® platform features new functionality to define voice and digital flow routing during holidays and emergencies. Using tailored flows during planned holiday periods or unplanned emergencies, PureCloud enables more efficient handling of contact center volumes during those times.

Key Points for Holiday and Emergency Routing:

• Available for voice, email and SMS channels
• Define routing of voice calls to special holiday and emergency flows
• Define inbound email and SMS flow behavior for specific holidays and emergencies
• Central location for setting schedules, including holidays throughout the year
• Single page for viewing and toggling emergencies in progress

Feature Overview

Holiday and emergency routing lets contact center managers take control over steering of calls, email and SMS during both routine and abnormal closures. Specifying behavior as well as prompting and routing for holiday schedules is key to manage contact center volume around special events and holidays. Having a way to quickly and easily toggle emergency in-progress notifications and route behavior ensures that unplanned or semi-planned critical events are handled efficiently.

Holiday Scheduling

Administrators and contact center managers can define all holidays and special events for the year in one easy-to-manage scheduling location. Each event schedule has a Name, Date, Recurrence, Start Time and End Time. Event schedules are organized into Schedule Groups that have an associated time zone.

Configure inbound Direct Inward Dialing (DID) with a Schedule Group and Holiday flow routing. When a voice call hits the contact center, Schedules Groups are evaluated per inbound DID to determine if the call should be sent to the Open, Closed or Holiday flow. You can configure holiday flows with a specific subset of open and closed functionality like reduced IVR options. This will be further developed in the future to facilitate schedule-based call steering within flows.

Configure inbound schedule-based routing for both email and SMS flows using a drag-and-drop interface. Contact center managers can simply select the holiday schedule to evaluate and then design special behaviors, such as sending a different auto-reply, for when that holiday occurs.

Emergency Planning

Emergency Groups are defined and managed in a central location. Each group represents a geographical location, region or some other logical grouping. During an emergency in progress, you can quickly activate the appropriate group with a single click and then deactivate it once the situation is resolved. Activating a single Emergency Group could affect one or more DIDs (for voice) or flows (for email and SMS) at the same time, depending on the configuration.

Routing is defined per inbound DID to steer voice calls to a specific emergency flow once the associated Emergency Group is activated. You can use emergency flows to notify callers, modify routing behavior or even prevent future calls from reaching queues during unplanned or semi-planned critical events, such as fires, natural disasters or power outages.

Inbound schedule-based steering can be configured per Emergency Group for both email and SMS flows via a drag-and-drop interface. When there is an emergency in progress, the special behavior defined for that Emergency Group is activated. Once the Emergency Group is deactivated, the flow evaluation reverts to inactive and normal behavior resumes.

APIs for emergency functionality are available on the Developer Forum to build custom applications. For example, you could build a mobile app that enables an administrator to activate an emergency from his or her smartphone.

Use Cases

• If today is December 25, you can route calls to a holiday message and voicemail.
• If there is a fire at the California call center location, you can activate an emergency-in-progress for the California Emergency Group and route calls to a targeted message and limited set of self-service functionalities.
• If today is Independence Day and a high-priority customer sends an SMS, route the customer to an open queue. You also can route non-priority customers to a queue that will be open after the holiday.
• If today is Independence Day and an email arrives containing the keyword “urgent,” you can route the call to an open queue and send an auto-reply to let the customer know their query is being handled. Otherwise, send a holiday auto-reply.

Learn more about designing flows in the PureCloud Architect tool by visiting the Resource Center.