Create and manage capacity profiles

Article
08/12/2022
5 minutes to read

Introduction

You can create capacity profiles and assign them to agents to define the types and amount of work they can take. Capacity profiles contain information, such as the amount of work, concurrent or daily capacity, and whether other channels are affected.

Capacity management helps administrators create various capacity profiles and associate users with matching profiles.
The administrator can block the agent from being allocated extra work when they're working on certain channels, such as phone calls.
The supervisor can override the agent's configured capacity and assign work to user manually.
In the assignment rule, you can create a rule to find an agent whose capacity profile matches that of the work item.

Configure profile-based capacity if any of the following scenarios are applicable:

Your agents are varied in experience and skill sets.
Agents need an upper limit on the amount of work assigned to them.
Work items are of different complexity and assigned from different channels.
Assignment on one channel impacts the assignments of another channel. For example, agents on phone calls shouldn't be assigned another work.

Important

We recommend that you configure either capacity profiles or capacity units in your organization, but not both.
The capacity is not considered during consult or monitor.

Create a capacity profile and assign to users

Create a capacity profile, and use it in a workstream that is used for routing work items.

For a capacity profile, you can add or remove users and edit any setting except reset frequency. If you no longer require the profile, you can delete it.

Go to one of the admin apps, and perform the following steps.
- In the site map, select User management in Customer support. The User management page appears.
- In the site map, select User attributes under Advanced settings.
- Go to the Service Management change area, and select User attributes from the Unified routing menu.
Select the Manage option for Capacity profile.
On the Capacity profiles page, select Create new.
On the Details tab of the Create capacity profile dialog box, enter the following details:
- Profile name: Name for the capacity profile.
- Work item limit: Number of units of the work type that the agent can be assigned.
- Reset frequency: Period after which capacity consumption can be reset for agents. If you select Immediate, capacity will be reset immediately. If you select End of day, capacity will be reset after the agent's shift ends. Once configured, you'll have to recreate the capacity profile if you want to change the reset frequency.
- Assignment blocking: Set the toggle to Yes. When the work item limit is reached, a new work item won't be automatically assigned to the agent.
On the Users tab, select Add user, and in the Users list, select the users. Alternatively, use the Search option to search for and add the user.

Important

Users must be configured as a bookable resource to be assigned the capacity profile. More information: Manage users.
Select Add user. The capacity profile is assigned to the user.

Use capacity profiles

After you create the capacity profiles, configure the following settings to assign work items to agents at runtime:

Set the capacity profile in the work distribution settings. The profile will be applied to all the work items that are routed through the workstream. More information: Configure work distribution
Set the capacity profile in a classification ruleset for the workstream as a rule output. Append the new capacity profile to the work item. During assignment, unified routing will look for an agent who has available capacity in both the profiles, the default profile from the workstream and the appended profile from the classification. More information: Create classification rulesets based on capacity profiles

You need not define assignment rules specific to capacity profiles at queue level to find agents with matching capacity profiles. If capacity profile is attached to a work item, then the system will ensure that the assigned agent has the matching capacity profile.

Release capacity for agents

For the system to efficiently manage agent workload, agent capacity needs to be released automatically when agents complete their assigned work items. Based on system settings, the agent capacity is released in the following manner:

Conversation: When the agents end the conversation and close their session.
Case: When the agent resolves the case. Capacity is also released automatically when agent cancels the case, assigns it to another agent, or removes their assignment by clearing their name from the Worked By field on the Queue Item details dialog.
All records and activities: For activities, such as email that's configured for record routing, capacity is not released automatically. You'll need to go to the queue item dialog and remove the agent name from the Worked By field. Capacity is also released when the assigned queue item is deleted.

Escalation profiles

The escalation profile is used when a chat conversation is escalated to a voice or video call. This profile is available out of the box and can't be edited. When an agent escalates a chat to a voice or video call, a new session starts and an escalation profile is attached to the work item, so that the agent doesn’t receive a new chat or voice call until the current call with the customer is over. If the agent transfers the video or voice call to another agent, the escalation profile becomes applicable to the new agent.

Multiple capacity profiles in a single workstream

Let us take a scenario where you want to route cases as follows:

Agents can work on maximum two high priority cases per day.
Agents can work on maximum four cases of normal priority.
But the agent should never be assigned more than five cases per day of high priority and normal priority.

To achieve the scenario

Create the following profiles:
- High-priority profile: Two cases per day, reset at the end of day
- Normal-priority profile: Four cases per day, reset at the end of day
- Total-capacity profile: Five cases per day, reset at the end of day
In the workstream, set the "Total-capacity profile" as the default profile.
Use the classification rules to set the capacity profiles for the work items as "High-priority profile" or "Normal-priority profile" according to the priority of the case.
Ensure that the agents have all the three profiles.

Runtime behavior of multiple capacity profiles in a single workstream

When the high priority work item comes, it will be stamped with "Total-capacity profile" and "High-priority profile".
An agent who has capacity in both these profiles will be selected. When the work item is assigned, capacity will be consumed from both the profiles.
Similarly, for normal priority cases, the capacity will be consumed from both "Total-capacity profile" and "Normal-priority profile".