ASAP Service Objective
Use the Field Service ASAP objective to instruct the scheduling engine to prioritize scheduling an appointment at the earliest possible time. Scheduling appointments as soon as possible improves customer satisfaction and SLA adherence and allows for a more utilized schedule with less resource idle time.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic (not available in all orgs) and Lightning Experience |
| The Agentforce Field Service and Operations core features, managed package, and mobile app are available in Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions. |
This is a Field Service managed package feature.
With data from your entire Salesforce org and other external sources, you can also use the ASAP objective to strategically guide the engine to expedite service in critical scenarios, even if it means increasing travel time or other costs. For example, prioritize scheduling appointments for imminent asset failures detected via IoT or asset monitoring This prioritization mitigates downtime and potential damage. You can do this by configuring an ASAP service objective with relevance groups configured to look at certain appointment criteria. Or, proactively manage customer relationships by expediting service for dissatisfied customers or those with high churn risk, directly impacting retention and customer lifetime value.
Include the ASAP objective in a scheduling policy and define a weight to control how much the scheduling engine prefers scheduling an appointment to an earlier date or time over other scheduling preferences, such as minimizing travel time. When you use the ASAP objective to prioritize scheduling an appointment at the earliest possible date or time, consider also how its weighting affects other scheduling goals (service objectives).
The earliest date or time an appointment can be scheduled is represented as the latest value of either the current date or time, the appointment’s earliest start permitted date or/ time, the appointment arrival window start time, or the optimization horizon start time (when you’re using an optimization service). This value represents the earliest logical time the appointment can be scheduled. The ASAP objective scores earlier scheduling options higher than later ones.
For example, consider an appointment with
- Earliest Start Date: January 1, 2024, at 8:00 AM
- Due Date: January 30, 2024, at 8:00 PM
The current time is January 7, 2024, at 12:00 PM, and the optimization horizon is from January 10, 2024, at 5:00 AM to January 17, 2024, at 5:00 AM.
In this scenario, the earliest time the optimizer can schedule the appointment is the start of the optimization horizon on January 10, 2024, at 5:00 AM. Assuming all other factors remain the same, scheduling an appointment at this time receives a higher score than scheduling an appointment on January 10, 2024, at 6:00 AM.
The ASAP objective is graded on a scale of 0 to 30 days in the future, where the earliest date/time described in the example is considered as 0. Understanding this scale is important when you consider the weighting of this objective relative to other objectives. For example, scheduling an appointment 1 day in the future versus 28 days has a significant difference on the 0 to 30 day scale. However, if all your appointments have 2-hour appointment windows, scheduling an appointment earlier in the 2-hour appointment window versus later in the appointment window has a less pronounced difference on the 0 to 30 day scale.
When You’re Using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization
Using the 0 to 30 day scale, each minute that an appointment is scheduled after the earliest possible scheduled time is penalized, even minutes greater than the 30-day scale. The penalty is calculated as X minutes divided by the 30-day scale (30days x 24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour). The total penalty points are multiplied by the weight of the ASAP objective in the scheduling policy used to contribute to the resulting score of the schedule for that appointment.
This calculation can be used to equate to the penalty per minute of added travel time in the Minimize Travel Time objective.
When you use Get Candidates, the assessed penalty is normalized on a 0 to 100 scale to display the objective score explanation.
When You’re Not Using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization
The scheduled time for an appointment is graded on the 0 to 30 day scale. Even if an appointment is scheduled after 30 days, the worst possible grade is 0. The graded value of the schedule for that appointment is multiplied by the weight of the ASAP objective in the scheduling policy used to contribute to the resulting score of the schedule for that appointment.
When you use scheduling operations that aren’t optimization, such as Book Appointment, Get Candidates, Schedule, Fill-In Schedule, and Group Nearby actions, the objective score isn’t based on using a scale. Instead, the score is determined relative to the other scheduling options. For example, if you can schedule the appointment right now, 1 hour from now, and 2 hours from now, the objective scores are 100, 50, and 0 respectively on a scoring scale from 0 to 100.
- Use the ASAP Objective With Relevance Groups
With Relevance Groups, you can set different weights to ASAP objectives to prioritize different scenarios and service appointments in Field Service. For example, you can create a specific ASAP objective with a higher weight to expedite an appointment with a customer who has a low customer sentiment score. This way, you can make sure that your most important customers are getting the service they need, even if it’s at the expense of travel time or other objectives.
