Appointment Objects in Education Cloud

Service Resources (Staff)

Service Resources represent staff members available for appointments, such as academic advisors, admissions counselors, or financial aid advisors.

See Set Up Appointment Data Manually.

Service Territories (Characteristics and Locations)

Service Territories represent common characteristics for grouping appointments, usually the locations where your staff takes appointments.

If your university has multiple campuses, you can set up a service territory per campus. And if your staff works in different locations depending on the days of the week, or wants to use different channels depending on the topic, service territories can reflect that too.

But service territories aren’t limited to locations! You can model departments or group topics. For example, you can have a service territory for admissions and another for academic advising.

Skills

Skills help learners narrow down and choose the right resource for their appointments. Skills are especially useful for topics that require specific expertise, such as advanced degree planning.

Engagement Channel Types

Engagement Channel Types store the channels that your staff uses to meet learners.

A staff member can offer multiple channels at multiple locations and for multiple topics. For example, learners can schedule appointments with an advisor for in-person meetings on some days, and video calls on others.

Work Type Groups and Work Types (Appointment Topics)

Work Type Groups and Work Types together represent appointment topics such as academic advising, admissions counseling, interviews, or campus tours and visits.

While work type groups represent the topics themselves, work types serve as templates for high-level appointment details such as the duration. Structure work type groups to represent a hierarchy of topics. For example, an academic advising work type group includes child work type groups for degree planning and course scheduling. When scheduling appointments, users select the topic at the lowest level of the hierarchy. They can’t select parent-level work type groups, and Salesforce doesn’t apply any work type assigned to that parent.

A work type can apply to multiple work type groups to share characteristics. Conversely, we recommend that, for clarity:

• You assign only one work type to each work type group. For drop-ins, if you map multiple work type groups to one work type, Salesforce only shows one work type group topic name when listing the available time slots.
• When you have topics and subtopics, only assign a work type to the child work type groups.

To avoid issues with appointment scheduling, create no more than 4,000 appointment topics.

Appointment Categories

Appointment categories determine whether an appointment is a drop-in appointment or a scheduled one.

If your staff offers both options for a topic, we recommend that you create a topic for each option, for example Academic Advising (Drop-In) and Academic Advising (Scheduled).

Shifts

Shifts determine your staff's appointment availability.

Create and update shifts with the staff’s work hours for one or more service territories. For example:

• An academic advisor has an on-campus shift on Mondays and Wednesdays to advise first-year students, and a virtual shift on Fridays open to all students.
• A career counselor offers drop-in consultations on Tuesday mornings, and wants Salesforce to show them as unavailable during their time off for the holidays.

Cases and Success Teams

Cases and Success Teams determine which case teams, assigned or unassigned, are available for appointments, based on the case record type. Salesforce uses your existing learners' Case records. For example, your institution has cases for IT support and academic advising. To make academic advising case teams bookable, map that record type through success teams.

Success teams are technically required only for unassigned case teams to show in the appointment setup flow. But we recommend that you also map a success team for each assigned team. This configuration makes them available to learners that they’re not assigned to. For example, if a student wants to explore subjects beyond their current curriculum, they can ask a front-desk worker to meet someone that they heard about from another student. If the record type on the student's existing case matches the unassigned team's record type, Salesforce adds the appointment to their case. If it doesn't, the staff member must create a case with that record type before booking an appointment with that team.

Setting up success teams is required even if your institution assigns individual staff members to learners directly instead of case teams.

For best performance, we recommend that case teams have fewer than 20 members. If you create larger teams, the appointment setup flow takes longer to load the available time slots.

See Map Case Teams to Success Teams to Define Appointment Availability.

Service Appointments

Service Appointments represent appointments that your staff or learners schedule.