Get Started with Appointment Distribution
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how the resource utilization score is calculated.
- Explain how Appointment Distribution handles anonymous appointments.
The financial year is coming to an end and Cumulus bank is seeing a rise in customer interest. Customers want to renew their insurance, make investments, restructure mortgages, apply for business loans, and so on. Some customers have an existing relationship with the bank while others are looking to build one. This has resulted in a steady flow of appointments to financial advisors at the bank.
But there seems to be a problem. Some financial advisors have their calendars full of appointments, while others are barely getting any. The appointments aren’t getting distributed evenly across advisors, and the workload balance across advisors needs improvement.
Fola Johnson, who leads the team of advisors, is concerned about this imbalance and reaches out to Matt, the Salesforce admin at Cumulus bank. Matt tells her about Appointment Distribution, a feature that helps even out appointment allocation between service resources, who are financial advisors in this case. In this module, we find out how the feature works and follow along as Matt sets it up.
What’s Your Score?
Appointment distribution is based on the utilization score of a financial advisor, which is a measure of how occupied or utilized an advisor is. Matt can choose how often the utilization score gets calculated: Weekly, Monthly, or Parameter-Based. The Weekly and Monthly frequencies let you identify the least occupied advisor in the current week or month respectively. Parameter-Based frequency identifies least occupied advisors by checking their utilization scores for the upcoming time period that the branch manager selected.
To learn more about calculation frequency, see How Appointment Distribution Works.
How Appointment Distribution Works
Appointment distribution lets Cumulus bank allocate appointments quickly and evenly among financial advisors. So what happens when you don’t have appointment distribution enabled? When a new anonymous appointment request comes in, Salesforce Scheduler fetches all the eligible financial advisors for the selected appointment type and bank branch, and shows their availability on the time slot screen. When the customer selects a time slot, the appointment gets automatically assigned to any advisor who’s available for that slot.
But when Matt enables appointment distribution, Salesforce Scheduler uses financial advisors’ utilization scores to find and show the time slots of 10 advisors who are least occupied.
When the customer selects a time slot, the least occupied advisor for that time slot is automatically assigned to the appointment. Easy peasy! And Matt can customize the number of advisors to show. We learn how to do this in the next unit.
Here’s what anonymous resource booking looks like before and after Appointment Distribution is enabled.
Appointment Distribution with Multi-Resource Scheduling
Customers often request more than one advisor and want to discuss multiple topics. A customer, for example, wants an investment advisor and a mortgage advisor to attend the same appointment. While calculating the utilization score of advisors for multi-resource appointments, Salesforce Scheduler considers an equal duration of time for all the advisors that are scheduled for the appointment. If the appointment is for 1 hour, both the advisors are considered occupied for 1 hour each.
What About Cancellations?
When an appointment is created, modified, or canceled, Salesforce Scheduler updates the assigned financial advisor's utilization score. There are times when the purpose of a future meeting is achieved through other means, such as a phone conversation or an email update to the customer. In such cases, advisors are free to mark a future appointment as complete. If a financial advisor marks a future appointment as complete, their time is shown as free and their utilization score is updated.
Hooray! You’re now familiar with how Appointment Distribution works. In the next unit, we learn how Matt enables Appointment Distribution and configures it to the needs of Fola’s team.