Get Started with Appointment Invitations
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how sharing service resource availability using invitation URLs works.
- List the high-level steps for enabling authenticated users to share resource availability and enabling authenticated customers to book appointments.
Before You Start
Consider completing Set Up Salesforce Scheduler.
Appointment-Scheduling Challenges at Cumulus
Ryan Dobson is a wealth manager at Cumulus Bank and works with customers from three branches: San Francisco, Irvine, and Bellevue.
He’s based out of the San Francisco head office, where he typically meets wealth management customers in person. As for his customers in Irvine and Bellevue, he meets with them virtually.
Recently, Ryan prioritized seeing his customers from Irvine and Bellevue in person. For this reason, he plans to work from the Irvine branch in March and the Bellevue office in April. Tessa Mason, Ryan's assistant, helped him with a travel itinerary.
They want to make good use of his time, so he can meet with as many customers as possible, in person. The customer list is long, so it's going to take some coordination to squeeze all the meetings in. Plus, there's another challenge to add to the mix. Some customers want to meet Ryan along with other specialists, making planning even more daunting. There’s no easy way for customers to book appointments directly with Ryan.
How can Ryan and Tessa avoid a quagmire of back-and-forth communication with customers as they try to schedule meetings?
Enter Matt O’Brien, the Salesforce admin at Cumulus Bank.
Ryan and Tessa meet with Matt to ask him for help with their appointment-scheduling woes. Luckily, Matt knows just the trick: sharing service resource availability using appointment invitation URLs. In this case, a service resource is a wealth manager like Ryan.
How It Works
Users—like wealth managers and their assistants—can generate appointment invitation URLs to share service resource availability with customers. This makes it easy for customers to schedule appointments directly with the service resource.
To create an invitation, the user specifies the appointment details, starting with the service resource. This may be an employee, partner, or asset. Next, the user selects the work type group and the appointment type or engagement channel. Then they choose the service territory and availability start date. If needed, they can set the availability end date.
To ensure that customers book appointments in advance, users can set an expiration date for the URL. They can also mark an appointment invitation as inactive if they want to activate it later. Here’s an example Appointment Invitation record.
It’s also possible to share combined availability, which shows when multiple resources are available at the same time. For example, share when a wealth manager, a real estate specialist, and a specific asset, like a meeting room, are all free.
Once the appointment invitation is created, users share the invitation URL with customers.
When customers open the URL, Salesforce Scheduler dynamically calculates resource availability based on the criteria specified in the appointment invitation and shows the available time slots. Here’s an example of what the customer sees when they open the URL.
The customer selects their preferred time and books an appointment.
Standard Flow Templates
Salesforce Scheduler provides two standard flow templates to generate and use appointment invitations.
- Use the Generate Appointment Invitation flow template to create and customize flows that enable users to share resource availability.
- Use the Book Appointment from Invitation flow template to create and customize flows that enable customers to book appointments.
Availability Sharing and Appointment Booking
Ryan works with authenticated customers and unauthenticated prospects. Authenticated customers are those with Salesforce Experience Cloud site credentials, while prospects are potential customers who don’t have site credentials yet. Matt has to perform the setup twice—once for authenticated customers and another for prospects. First, Matt performs the set up for authenticated customers. Later on, he does the setup for unauthenticated prospects.
Here are the high-level steps to enable users to share availability with authenticated customers and for those customers to book appointments using the invitation URLs.
- Clone the Book Appointment from Invitation template to create a flow.
- Add the flow to the Experience Cloud site that’s used by authenticated customers.
- Clone the Generate Appointment Invitation template to create a flow, and then customize the flow.
- Set up permissions for users and authenticated customers.
- Enable users to run the Generate Appointment Invitation flow.
Later in this module, you follow along as Matt performs the lower-level steps.
If you want to enable users to add multiple service resources to schedule appointments, you must also perform these steps.
- Ensure that the Multi-Resource Scheduling setting is enabled. Matt already knows that the Multi-Resource Scheduling setting is enabled at Cumulus. To learn more, see Enable and Configure Multi-Resource Scheduling.
- In the Generate Appointment Invitation flow, the Disable Multi-Resource Scheduling attribute of the Select Service Appointment Time flow screen component is set to False. Matt takes this step later in the module.
Matt has his requirements in place. In the next unit, let’s follow along as he clones and customizes the flows.