Service Appointments, Visits, and Interactions in Workforce Scheduling

Available in: Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise and Unlimited Editions

Workforce Scheduling supports scheduling work at your organization’s location (on-site) and at a customer’s location or another external site (in the field). Scheduled work is backed by a Service Appointment record. For industry-specific work, Workforce Scheduling schedules Visits or Interactions instead. Visits represent field work, for example, home inspections or property assessments. Interactions represent on-site work at your organization’s location, for example, benefits interviews at a government office or DMV licensing appointments. When you schedule a Visit or Interaction, Workforce Scheduling creates a Service Appointment in the background. The record type that gets scheduled — Service Appointment, Visit, or Interaction — is determined by the work type.

Service Appointments are the core scheduling object in Salesforce. The scheduling engine uses Service Appointments to find available time slots, assign resources, optimize schedules, and detect scheduling conflicts. Scheduling configurations — including work types, service territories, and scheduling policies — tell the engine how to schedule and assign work.

Which record should you use? You typically work with Service Appointment records directly when scheduling field work that doesn’t require industry-specific fields or workflows, such as break-fix, repair, or maintenance work, which is backed by a Work Order.

Visits are industry-specific objects for field appointments, commonly used in Agentforce Public Sector for home visits, inspections, or case management. Use Visits when the work requires a service resource to travel to a customer site, a property, or another external location. Each Visit is automatically created and connected to a Service Appointment and Work Order in the background. You don’t interact with the underlying Service Appointment or Work Order directly — the scheduling engine keeps them synchronized with the Visit.

Interactions represent on-site appointments at your organization’s location, such as in-office interviews or orientation sessions. Interactions are also created and synced automatically with Service Appointments in the background. Unlike Visits, Interactions are designed for customers coming to your location — for example, a benefits interview at a Family Services office or a DMV licensing appointment.

The scheduling engine uses the appointment details on the Visit or Interaction record, such as the customer address, service territory, earliest start, and due date, to find optimal time slots and assign resources. When you schedule a Visit or Interaction, the scheduling engine schedules the underlying Service Appointment. When the engine assigns a resource, the Visit or Interaction updates automatically. For most fields, you edit the Visit or Interaction record — not the underlying Service Appointment or Work Order — and your changes sync to the Service Appointment.

The scheduling and optimization engine owns a few fields on the Visit or Interaction record: Scheduled Start, Scheduled End, Assigned Resource, and Status. These fields are read-only on the record page. To change status, use an action that updates it, such as Schedule, Cancel Appointment, or Change Status in the Operations Console. The change syncs to the Service Appointment automatically.