Get Started with Inbound Scheduling

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define the purpose of inbound scheduling.
  
• Provide the required permissions and access to existing customers.
  

Empower Your Customers—and Prospects

Although Salesforce Scheduler lets Fola and her team of advisors easily set up appointments with customers, wouldn’t it be great if customers and prospects could also schedule and modify appointments? Customers or prospects wouldn’t have to call up the bank and request an appointment. And employees won’t receive as many calls asking for appointments, nor will they have to worry about scheduling the appointment themselves. 

Fola realizes that it can not only improve the banking experience of the Cumulus Bank customers, but also help the bank get more business.

Inbound scheduling in Salesforce Scheduler lets you do exactly that (and more!), and setting it up is pretty straightforward. 

To configure inbound scheduling in your Experience Cloud site or on your website, you need at least one of these licenses. Check out the Resources section to learn more about these licenses.

• Customer Community
  
• Customer Community Plus
  
• Partner Community
  
• Channel Account
  

The Initial Settings

To let existing customers (or credentialed users) book appointments, Matt must grant them certain user and object permissions and update sharing settings.

1. From Setup, enter Profiles in the Quick Find box, and then select Profiles.
   
2. Click Edit next to the profile that you want to assign permissions to.
   
3. Under General User Permissions, select these permissions.
   

   User Permission	Purpose
   Access Activities	To create and update events on Salesforce Calendar (required only if the Event Management setting is enabled).
   Edit Events	To create and edit events on Salesforce Calendar (required only if the Event Management setting is enabled).
   Run Flows	To run inbound flows.

4. 
   Under Standard Object Permissions, define appropriate access levels for these objects.
   

   Object	Permissions
   Accounts, Contacts, Operating Hours, Service Resources, Service Territories, Work Types, Work Type Groups, Appointment Topic Time Slot	Read
   Service Appointments	Read, Create, Edit

5. 
   Save your changes.
   

With the right permissions in place, Matt updates Sharing Settings.

1. From Setup, enter Sharing Settings in the Quick Find box, and then select Sharing Settings.
   
2. Under Organization-Wide Defaults, click Edit, and set the sharing settings as described in this table.

   Object	Default External Access
   Calendar	Show Details and Add Events
   Service Appointment	Public Read and Write
   Service Resource, Service Territory, Work Type, Work Type Group, User (required only if the Event Management setting is enabled)	Public Read Only

3. 
   Click Save.
   

If the Event Management setting is enabled in your org, additional configuration is necessary to make the Inbound Modify Appointment flow work.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Grant Authenticated Users Required User and Object Permissions
• Salesforce Help: Update Sharing Settings
• Salesforce Help: Additional Configuration for Inbound Modify Appointment Flow
• Salesforce Help: Communities User Licenses
• Salesforce Help: Create Partner Users
• Salesforce Help: Experience Cloud Site Setup Basics
• Salesforce Help: Build and Customize Your Experience Cloud Site