How to create and use ranking profiles for schedule preferences, schedule bidding, ASAP acceptance, and vacation bidding.
What are ranking profiles?
Ranking profiles allow defining the order in which preferences should be applied to agents. For example, with a seniority ranking profile, agents with longer tenure will receive preference over those hired more recently. Ranking profiles are used in schedule preferences (day off and start time preferences – e.g., when optimizing schedules), schedule bidding, priority for ASAP acceptance, and vacation bidding.
Prior to setting up ranking profiles, determine the factors you plan to use for ranking agents and the order in which those ranks will apply. E.g., is seniority more important than a quality score? If there is a tie, should last name be the tie breaker or a random tiebreak score?
Planning the structure ahead of time will save time when setting up the ranking profiles.
Ranking profile options
You can create multiple ranking profiles and have complete control over the order in which agents are included. Ranking profiles are flexible and work in a manner consistent with most Community objects.
Common ranking profiles and sorting criteria include—
- Seniority (based on hire date)
- Name (alphabetically by first letter of last name)
- Performance score (manually entered rank)
Tiebreak value
You can use a tiebreak value in the ranking by entering a number for each agent in their Basic properties. An agent with a tiebreak value of 1 will receive preference over an agent with a tiebreak value of 12, all other factors being equal.
Alternatively, you can enter a custom property for each agent in their profile, such as a quality score.
Creating ranking profiles
This is a multi-step process.
- If you will be using a performance score or other custom field, set up the custom properties to use for ranking.
- Apply the custom properties to the agents.
- Define the ranking profile settings.
- Include the ranking profile in the schedule or vacation bidding set-up.
Step-by-step
Create the custom properties
Navigate to Settings > Application settings > People settings > Custom properties for people.
Select Click here to create a new custom property.
Enter a name (required), description, default value, and display width (required). The display width is the number of characters for the field.
If desired, check the box Value is required for all people to ensure that everyone will have a value for this custom property in their profile. Check this only if necessary.
When complete, click Save. This property is now available as an option when applying custom properties to agents.
Apply the custom property to agents
Some ranking profiles will use data default properties from the agent profile such as using hire date for seniority. For other custom properties, you may need to manually add values to each agent’s profile.
Navigate to Settings > People & agent templates > People.
Select the first person in your list and in the Steps to Success navigate to their profile Properties.
In the Basic properties, navigate to the Custom properties tab to view currently applied custom properties, then click Edit and enter a unique value for a property (e.g., applying a performance score).
For this field, if any numbers will be greater than 10 include leading zeros (e.g., 005). Otherwise, 11 (one, one) comes before 2.
Click Save.
Tiebreak Value
In the Basic Properties tab, enter a Tiebreak value between 1 and 1000 that the system can use if all other criteria match between two agents.
Note: The higher the tiebreak value number, the lower the agent is in the list when the system is breaking a tie.
The agent with the tiebreak value of 1 will have preference over the agent with the tiebreak value of 5.
Define the ranking profile
Navigate to Settings > Application settings > People settings > Ranking profiles.
Enter a descriptive name for the profile and an optional description.
Start time preference: Applies to schedule bidding and generating optimized schedules with seniority-based schedule generation. Select whether the system should average the start time across the entire week or use the preferred time from the first scheduled day.
Average start time: If the preferred start time range is 8 am – 10 am, the system will use 9 am as the preference.
Preferred start time of first scheduled day: If Monday preferred start time is 8 am, it will use that time as the preference for the whole week.
Start time penalty factor: Applies to schedule bidding and generating optimized schedules with seniority scheduling.
This provides a way for the scheduling engine to evaluate the quality of the schedule for a person based on their start time preference option. The schedule assignment algorithm will use this as a multiplier when examining the difference between a candidate schedule and a participant’s start time preference.
If the value for this field is low (“Slight penalty”) then a variance in start time only minimally influences the selection of a candidate schedule. If it is high (“Significant penalty") then it magnifies the variance in start time for a candidate schedule. This start time preference penalty is used to sort the candidate schedules and pick the one with the smallest penalty value.
Click Save to go to the next step.
Step 2: Configure sorting criteria. This step determines the order for the sorting criteria. Should hire date (seniority) be the most important/first criteria? Or performance score? It’s best practice to use more than one sorting option.
Click Add sort option.
The top sort options in yellow are values from the agent profile (either default properties such as hire date or manually entered such as tiebreak value). The bottom options in grey are ones added as custom properties in the agent profile.
After creating and saving the sort options, you can move the order up or down with the blue arrows, or remove an option with the red X.
Rank-based preferences in schedules
When generating an optimized schedule, there is an option to choose the rank-based preference type in the schedule task properties. The drop-down menu will contain a list of your ranking profiles to choose from.
Agent Schedule Preferences by Ranking
Agent schedule preferences allow agents flexibility in describing their preferences. Additionally, the scheduling engine includes the ability to swap schedules that may be preferred by higher ranking agents.
The engine will generate schedules in the same way it traditionally has, but then the swapper algorithm will compare the resulting schedules in conjunction with a Ranking Profile and determine if a schedule that a higher ranked agent prefers has been allocated to a lower ranked agent. If so, the algorithm will swap the schedules and move to the next agent on the list until the swapper has validated all the schedules against all agents’ preferences.
A number of rules and constraints dictate how this is completed. The support desk can help you optimally configure this feature for your environment should you elect to take advantage of this feature.
Calendar Partitions
When setting up a calendar partition for vacation bidding, select a ranking profile to use when the calendar is open for bidding. The ranking profile will not apply to waitlisting.