Customize a Scheduling Policy

Learning Objectives

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

Describe the standard scheduling policies provided by Salesforce.
Create a custom scheduling policy by cloning a standard policy.
Add a custom work rule to a scheduling policy.
Change the weight of a service objective.

Choose the Right Policy for Your Business Needs

Scheduling policies are not one size fits all. Different situations call for different priorities, and the scheduling engine needs to reflect that. A policy that works well for a routine day may not be the right fit when things get hectic. That is why Agentforce Field Service and Operations includes several scheduling policies out of the box, each designed with a specific scenario in mind.

Think about what a normal day looks like for a dispatcher. You scheduled your appointments automatically, and not many of them moved during the day. Your standard scheduling policy gets you through just fine.

But not every day goes according to plan. Suppose there’s an emergency, like a local power outage, and you must reschedule all the appointments in a given territory. Or a lot of high-priority appointments come in at once and you must move lower priority appointments. Or a product must be recalled immediately and you’ve installed it everywhere. Or...you get the idea.

This is where having multiple scheduling policies makes a real difference. Each policy is built around a different set of work rules and service objectives, so the engine knows what matters most in that moment. As the day changes, the dispatcher can switch to the policy that best matches the current situation, giving the engine the right instructions to build the best possible schedule.

Scheduling policy	Designed to...	Use it...
Customer First	Balance great customer service with travel minimization. Appointments are graded first by the customer’s selection of a preferred mobile worker or resource, then by the ability to schedule an appointment as soon as possible. The next priority is travel minimization. You can adjust this everyday policy if, for example, you prioritize travel minimization over immediate arrival.	During an average day.
High Intensity	Have mobile workers complete as many appointments as possible. This policy grades appointments first by minimizing travel and grouping appointments, then by scheduling appointments as soon as possible.	During periods of high service volumes, like a storm scenario, where employee productivity is your top priority.
Soft Boundaries	Balance great customer service with travel minimization, similar to the Customer First policy. But this policy also allows mobile workers to share their time between territories for better service coverage.	When you want mobile workers to cover nearby territories, such as in urban areas with small geographic territories.
Emergency	Use with the Emergency Chatter action to dispatch emergency service appointments.	For emergency situations, like someone being stuck in an elevator during a power outage.

Right now, you can start out by using the standard Customer First policy, and your dispatchers can choose different scheduling policies during the day if their situation changes.

Plan Your Scheduling Policies

Getting your scheduling policies right is not something that happens overnight. It’s a journey, and like any good journey, it helps to know where you are before you figure out where you are going. The good news is that every step forward, no matter how small, can have a real impact on your dispatchers, your mobile workers, and the customers they serve.

Think of scheduling modernization as a mountain climb with four stages. Each stage builds on the last, and every step forward brings more efficiency, more automation, and better outcomes for your business and your customers.

A mountain showing the steps of the field service journey ascending to the peak with visualize and automate highlighted.

Manual: This is where most organizations start. Dispatchers are in full control, handling every scheduling decision themselves. It gets the job done, but it is time-consuming, heavily dependent on individual knowledge, and leaves a lot of room for human error. At this stage, scaling up is a real challenge because everything relies on people doing things by hand.
Automated: At this stage, you start reducing the manual workload in a meaningful way. Scheduling policies take over routine decisions, freeing up your dispatchers to focus on exceptions, urgent jobs, and building stronger relationships with field resources instead of spending their day manually piecing together a schedule. The result is a faster, more consistent scheduling process that does not depend on any one person to keep it running.
Optimized: Here, you are not just automating. You are continuously improving. The engine evaluates thousands of possible combinations to produce the most efficient schedule based on your specific business goals. Whether that means minimizing travel time, getting jobs done as early as possible, or making better use of lower-cost resources, the engine is always working to find the best possible outcome. This stage is where you really start to see the cost savings and productivity gains add up.
Innovation: At the top of the journey, your scheduling operation is running so smoothly that it actively drives business growth. Your KPIs improve, your field workforce is better utilized, and your organization can respond in real time when new work comes in or unplanned events disrupt the day. At this stage, Agentforce Field Service and Operations is not just supporting your operations. It is helping you expand them.

Not every implementation needs to reach the top of the mountain right away, and that is completely fine. But understanding where your organization sits today helps you make smarter decisions about how to configure your scheduling policies now and how to grow into more advanced automation over time.

Create a Scheduling Policy

Now that you have seen the out-of-the-box policies available in your org, it is time to start making them your own. Cloning an existing policy is a great way to get started. It gives you a working foundation to build on, so you are not starting from scratch, and it keeps the original policy intact in case you ever need to refer back to it.

To get started, let’s see how you can clone the Customer First policy:

From the App Launcher , find and click Field Service Admin.
Click the Field Service Settings tab and click Go to Guided Setup.
If Guided Setup checks permission sets, click Go to Guided Setup again.
Click Customize Scheduling Policies.
Hover over the Customer First policy to clone it.
Click and click OK.

Customize Scheduling Policies with the clone icon selected.

Click the new policy.
Enter the new policy’s name as Standard Scheduling Policy.
Click Add.

Now you have a brand-new scheduling policy. It uses the same values as the standard Customer First policy, but changes that you make to the new policy don’t affect the standard policy. That way, you can tweak this new policy but keep the standard Customer First policy as a reference.

Add a Work Rule

Remember when you created the Resource Availability work rule that gave your mobile workers an appointment free lunch break? Let’s add it to your new policy to make sure that the team gets their lunch breaks after all.

In the newly created Standard Scheduling policy, scroll down to Work Rules.
Use the arrows to add the Resource Availability - Lunch work rule to the list of Selected Rules.
Move any conflicting rules out of the list of selected rules. In this case, you should move Resource Availability back to Available Rules.

Screenshot showing the Ursa Major Resource Availability rule in the Selected Rules list.

Now service appointments can’t be scheduled during lunch break without creating a rules violation and your mobile workers can enjoy their break worry-free.

Change the Weight of Service Objectives

When you clone a scheduling policy, you inherit all of its work rules and service objectives. But inheriting them is just the starting point. The real power comes from tuning them to reflect what actually matters to your business, and that is where service objective weights come in.

Every service objective in a policy has a weight, which is a number that tells the scheduling engine how much importance to place on that objective relative to the others. A higher weight means the engine will prioritize that objective more strongly when evaluating candidates. A lower weight means it plays a smaller role in the final decision. For example, if minimizing travel time is a top priority for your business, you would give that service objective a high weight.

The engine takes all of these weights into account at once and uses them to find the best possible balance across your entire schedule. Getting your weights right can make a significant difference in the quality of your schedules. Even small adjustments can shift how the engine behaves, so it is worth taking the time to think carefully about what your business values most before making changes.

Once you have a clear picture of your priorities, you are ready to start adjusting. You can scroll to the Service Objectives section and examine the values for each service objective. The pie chart makes it easy to see how they compare to each other.

Pie chart displaying the service objectives in relation to each other.

To change the weight of a service objective, move its slider. For now, you can leave the values as they are.

By experimenting with service objective weights in a sandbox, you can fine-tune how Salesforce ranks potential candidates for every job. Whether you prioritize ASAP service to wow your customers or minimize travel to keep costs down, these small adjustments can lead to significant gains in productivity and technician utilization. Now that you've mastered the building blocks of scheduling policies, you're ready to move on to the next unit and explore how to update your schedule in real-time as the day unfolds.

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