Genesys Resource Allocation Prior to Resource Capacity Planning

The routing-allocation model that Genesys used prior to resource capacity planning depended on the state of an agent and the status of the agent's DN as determined by Stat Server. This dependency focused heavily on the Genesys telephony model, which is described in the “Genesys Telephony Model” section of the Reporting Technical Reference Guide.

The Genesys router, at the point of interaction distribution, selects a target–an agent–from a pool of potential participants that consists only of ready agents. Ready, from the router's default perspective, signifies that an agent has either of the following:

• No monitored interactions currently in progress or
• All monitored DNs in Ready state. (Other DNs assigned to the agent can reside in a less-than-Ready state, such as Monitored or NotMonitored as determined by the ranking that is provided in Stat Server's Status Priority tables.)

However, if you have set the router's useAgentState configuration option to false, Ready signifies that an agent has either of the following:

• No monitored interactions currently in progress.
• At least one monitored DN in Ready state. (Other DNs that can be assigned to the agent can reside in a less-than-Ready state, such as Monitored or NotMonitored as determined by the ranking that is provided in Stat Server's Status Priority tables.)

As a result of this ready-agent view, Genesys software, prior to resource capacity planning, supported a one-at-a-time model of interaction distribution. With few exceptions, this model is still well suited for environments that distribute live voice interactions. It does not, however accommodate situations in which an agent can receive and handle additional live voice calls while the agent is already actively involved in one - as might be preferable in rare situations in which a high-priority call, for example, enters the contact center and no other qualified agent is “ready” to handle it. (Given this scenario, the agent could place one call on hold and accept the second call.)

This ready-agent view is also not well suited for non-telephony–related media, such as e-mail, and is not particularly effective in blended media environments, such as those that distribute voice, e-mail, and chat interactions. To accommodate the distribution of multiple media, the 6.1 release of Universal Routing Server extended its strategy language to project the DN model onto interactions of nontelephonic types. This projection required DN configurations for media types such as email and chat - and not just one DN, but a separate DN for each of the interactions that agents could potentially handle simultaneously, for each media type, and for each agent. The number of interactions that an agent can simultaneously handle held a one-to-one correspondence to the number of DNs that are configured for that agent.

This “Media DN” model, however, did not depict reality; it did not allow the distribution of a voice interaction, for instance, to a particular agent if that agent was already participating in an e-mail interaction, nor could one specify that the agent was able to accept and participate in a predefined number of interactions simultaneously.