Update a Schedule

Learning Objectives

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

Set up appointment booking from work orders.
Schedule your first service appointment.
Explain the tools available to reschedule appointments in the Gantt.

Set Up Appointment Booking

With your scheduling policies doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, you can now start to focus on the most important part of your field service operation — scheduling service appointments. The most efficient way of doing that is through the work order your service rep creates while on call with the customer. That way, everything happens in one place, in real time, without anyone needing to switch between tools or follow up later.

When a customer contacts your company to schedule an appointment, they get to choose a time slot that works for them, anytime between the earliest start date and the due date. This choice narrows things down to a specific arrival window. For example, the mobile worker must arrive between 9:30 AM and 11:30 AM on January 5. The scheduling engine then finds the best qualified candidate who can show up during that arrival window.

This entire experience is powered by appointment booking, a feature that lets your service reps view available time slots and lock in appointments without ever leaving the work order page. Before your team can start using it though, you need to set it up. Let's walk through how.

From the App Launcher , click Field Service Admin.
Click the Field Service Settings tab.
Click Global Actions, then click the Appointment Booking tab.
Configure the settings using the following values:

Default scheduling policy: Customer First
Default operating hours: Mon-Fri 9am-5pm (East)
Select Pin three highest graded time slots to the top and Open extended view by default.
Leave the other settings as they are.

Click Save.

Appointment Booking tab showing the selected settings.

When using appointment booking and scheduling together, you get even more flexibility with sliding and reshuffling. Sliding moves a service appointment to an earlier or later time within the same shift, while reshuffling can move it to a different day or resource entirely — all within the resource's availability. Together, these tools reduce white spaces on the Gantt, making it easier to schedule longer appointments and meet SLA targets faster. And since reps, resources, and customers in large field service operations are often spread across different time zones, Field Service automatically displays appointment details in each user's own time zone, so everyone always sees the right time.

Book Appointments from Work Orders

Dispatchers aren't the only ones who schedule field service work. Customer service reps play a just as important role, often being the first point of contact when a customer calls with an issue. When a rep takes a call, they need to move quickly: understand the problem, create a work order, and get an appointment booked before the customer hangs up. The smoother that process is, the better the experience for everyone involved.

This is where the Book Appointment quick action really shines, letting your rep create a work order and book an appointment without ever losing context. The whole process flows naturally from one step to the next, right from within Salesforce. Let's walk through what this looks like in practice:

The first step is to ensure you have the right permissions for creating an appointment.

From the App Launcher , click Field Service Admin.
Click the Field Service Settings tab.
Click the Permission Sets tab.
Scroll down, and click Update Permissions for Field Service Integration.
Click Create Permissions for Field Service AI Agent.

Permission sets up to date

Now that you have all the permissions in place, it’s time to step into the shoes of your service rep and see how they create a work order and use the book appointments action to schedule a service appointment.

From the App Launcher , select Work Orders.
Click New in the top right corner.
From the Service Territory lookup, find and select New York Area.
Enter a suitable subject and description.
Click Save.
Open the work order you just created.
In the Feed tab, select Book Appointment
Click Get Appointments.
Click a suitable time slot from the list.

Ranked time slots for a work order

And just like that, you’ve scheduled your first service appointment with a few clicks. But let’s look at what happened behind the scenes. When you click Get Appointments, the scheduling engine grades time slots using the weighted service objectives set in your scheduling policy. Time slot ratings are as follows.

Ideal or Golden. These time slots have the highest grade. If you can, select one of these.
Recommended. These time slots have a fairly high grade, too. Select if the ideal time slots don’t work for you.
Satisfactory. While these time slots meet the minimum requirements, they’re not the best choice, but they get the job done.

After you choose the time slot, the appointment appears on the Gantt. Now all that’s left to do is to assign it to a mobile worker and you’ll be all set to deliver outstanding customer service in no time.

Assign and Reassign Appointments

The book appointment action is a great way to create your daily schedule quickly and easily. But schedules change. A technician calls in sick. A customer needs to reschedule. An urgent job pops up out of nowhere. That's where the dispatcher steps in.

The dispatcher’s job is to make sure that everything runs smoothly, and that means that sometimes they have to roll up their sleeves and reassign appointments manually. Luckily, the dispatcher console comes packed with powerful tools to make that process fast and straightforward. Let’s see how:

Operation	What it does	How to use it
Schedule	If an appointment is not yet scheduled, add it to the best slot on the Gantt.	In the appointment list or on the map, select one or more appointments and click Schedule.
Reschedule	If the schedule changes and the current time slot can't be used for a service appointment, use Reschedule to search for the next best slot.	In the Gantt, right-click the appointment and choose Reschedule.
Get Candidate	View a list of ranked candidates who can perform the job. Choose the candidate and time slot with the highest score.	In the Gantt, right-click the appointment and choose Get candidates. In the appointment list, click the appointment and choose Candidates.
Emergency Scheduling	Perform the job as quickly as possible. Emergency scheduling uses real-time traffic and its own scheduling policy. The Emergency policy allows candidates to travel from other territories and allows appointments to overlap.	In the Gantt, double-click the appointment, click the Feed tab, and choose Emergency. Choose to dispatch the mobile worker as soon as possible or after they complete their current service appointment.

You've now seen how straightforward it is to book and manage appointments from a customer service agent's perspective. And while that covers a big part of the scheduling picture, there's a whole other side to field service that's worth exploring – your dispatcher's perspective. In the next badge, we'll dive into the dispatcher console and see just how much you can do when you have the full power of field service scheduling at your fingertips.

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Update a Schedule

Learning Objectives

Set Up Appointment Booking

Book Appointments from Work Orders

Assign and Reassign Appointments

Resources