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Manage Availability and Exceptions in Salesforce Scheduler
Specify the availability of service resources, operating hours of service territories and work types, and visiting hours for accounts. Manage exceptions, such as holidays, absences, and manually created calendar events. To specify the rules that must be used by Salesforce Scheduler Engine to determine the available time slots, configure scheduling policies and Scheduler settings. Set up features to handle appointment distribution, multiresource scheduling, and concurrent scheduling.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience. |
| Available in: Enterprise and Unlimited Editions |
Manage Availability
To specify service resource availability, use operating hours or shifts. When your service resources have fixed work hours, you—as an admin—or service territory managers can use operating hours to specify service resource availability. When your service resources have flexible work hours, enable shifts. Then, service resources and service territory managers can create and manage shifts records.
Specify the availability of service territories using operating hours. If necessary, specify operating hours of work types and visiting hours for accounts.
Manage Availability Exceptions
Add exceptions to service territory and service resource availability.
- To avoid appointment bookings when your service territories aren’t operational, use holidays.
- To avoid appointment bookings when your service resources are on leave, use resource absences.
- To avoid bookings when your service resources are unavailable because of other meetings and events, configure scheduling policy rules to check calendars and determine availability.
Handle Special Appointment Scheduling Cases
Enable and configure features to handle different appointment scheduling scenarios.
- To ensure equitable distribution of appointments among service resources, use appointment distribution.
- To enable users to book multiple service resources for a single appointment, use multi-resource scheduling.
- To enable service resources to take up multiple appointments in a single time slot, use concurrent scheduling.
- Set Up Operating Hours in Salesforce Scheduler
Operating hours represent the time slots during which appointments can be scheduled. For example, if a bank allows mortgage appointments at a branch only Monday through Wednesday, from 8 AM to 2 PM, create operating hours for the mortgage work type that reflect this requirement. - Manage Shifts in Salesforce Scheduler
Shifts enable service resources to set up and update their frequently changing work hours. Service resources can set up shifts for different work hours for the same service territory, set up shifts beyond their service territory’s operating hours, and even set up shifts for more than one service territory. - Appointment Distribution
Appointment distribution lets you allocate appointments quickly and evenly among service resources. An equitable distribution of appointments ensures efficient use of service resources and increased productivity. Salesforce Scheduler uses service resources’ utilization scores to identify and suggest the least occupied eligible service resources for appointments. For an anonymous appointment, the least occupied eligible resource is automatically assigned to the appointment. - Enable and Configure Concurrent Scheduling
With concurrent scheduling, it’s easy to schedule multiple customer appointments in the same time slot. For example, a doctor’s office can let several patients book a Monday 1-2 PM appointment to ensure against downtime. Appointments appear as overlapping events on the Salesforce Calendar. - Enable and Configure Multi-Resource Scheduling
Multi-resource scheduling lets users create appointments that include more than one required service resource. An appointment can have a maximum of five required service resources: one primary required service resource plus four required service resources, including asset resources. - Enable and Configure Capacity-Based Scheduling
Control the number of appointments that can be scheduled for a given shift and type of work. Service resources can control the number of appointments per shift to meet customer needs. Territory managers can choose whether to distribute capacity in a shift for a work topic or across multiple work topics - Service Resource Absences in Salesforce Scheduler
Use absences to specify time periods that a service resource is unavailable to attend service appointments for. - Set Up Holidays in Salesforce Scheduler
Service territories can be non-operational due to state or regional holiday, or due to unforeseen circumstances. Territory managers can create holidays and link the holidays to the service territories to avoid bookings on days when the service territory is closed. For example, territory managers can create a holiday for Independence day or for a day when there’s heavy snowfall predicted due to which the branch has to close temporarily. Appointments that are already booked for an unplanned holiday require rescheduling. - Check Calendars to Determine Availability of Service Resources
During an appointment scheduling process, Salesforce Scheduler can check Salesforce calendar events and even external systems to determine the availability of service resources. - Determine Service Resource Availability by Work Type Groups
Salesforce Scheduler uses an intersection of operating hours of Service Territory, Service Territory Member, Work Type, and Account to determine service resource availability based on the scheduling policies and scheduler settings. If you want Salesforce Scheduler to also use work type groups to determine availability, enable the Operating Hours for Service Territory Members for Work Type Groups preference in Scheduler Settings. Then, enter work type groups for service territory member operating hours in service territory member records. This setting is enabled by default for orgs created after Summer ’21.
