Setting the scheduling rules

As an Office Manager, you can change the meeting types (in-office, via telephone, via video, or on location) of the subjects that are offered from your office. You can also adjust the scheduling rules for each subject — for example, the earliest and latest times an appointment can be booked, the duration of each appointment, and the buffer between appointments.

You can't add or delete the subjects offered by this office, nor can you enable meeting types that are currently disabled — that is done by an Administrator.

To update the rules for an office:

  1. From the left panel, select the Team tab.

  2. From the Offices drop-down, select the office for which you want to set the rules, and from the Settings section select Scheduling.

  3. Select the Planning rules tab.

    You see an overview of all the subjects offered to customers from the selected office. Toggle buttons indicate which meeting types (in-office, via telephone, via video, or on location) are available for each subject:

  4. To enable or disable appointments for a particular subject via a particular meeting type, toggle the button for that meeting type On or Off.

    You can only enable and disable meeting types that an admin has enabled for this particular office.

  5. To edit the planning rules for a subject, select the subject name. The subject is expanded to show the full set of rules:

    You can change any of these rules for any of the available meeting types, as follows:

    Option Description
    Auto accept

    On: appointments are automatically accepted and booked into the calendar of the Agent.

    Off: appointments are not booked automatically. When customers book an appointment, this will be treated as a request and the Agent must manually accept the appointment.

    Duration

    The length of time offered for each appointment.

    Trailing buffer time The length of time at the end of each appointment where the Agent is unavailable to other customers. For example, you may wish to allow the Agent time between appointments to write up their notes, or travel to their next appointment.
    Granularity

    The interval between the start times of the appointments offered to customers. The lower the interval, the more flexible your availability.

    However, if the Granularity is less than the Duration, you may end up with empty slots that are too short for an appointment. For example, if your appointments are 30 minutes duration but the granularity is 15 minutes, one customer might book an appointment starting at 10:00 and another at 10:45, meaning that the time between 10:30 and 10:45 will be unavailable for appointments because it is too short.

    Earliest slot shown

    How soon (from the point in time at which a customer is using the Engage plugin) that available appointments are displayed and can be booked by customers.

    For example, if you select 1 day, a customer accessing the Engage plugin at 2pm on a Monday will see available appointments starting from 2pm on Tuesday.

    If this is set to 0, customers can book appointments that start immediately.

    Latest slot shown

    The number of hours or days into the future that available appointments are shown and can be booked by a customer. This is based from the time at which the customer is using the Engage plugin to look for a suitable appointment time.

    Rank 1 / Rank 2 priority threshold These options are only available if the Agent prioritization feature has been enabled.
    Maximum concurrent appointments

    The maximum number of appointments for this subject that can be booked for a single Agent within the same time frame. For example:

    • If each of your Agents can only take one appointment for one customer at a time for this subject, set this number to 1.
    • If your Agents can assist two customers at the same time for this subject (for example, if both customers are interested in the same information), then set this number to 2.
  6. Review your changes (which will be highlighted in yellow) and select Save.