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What Happens During Appointment Booking?

This section describes the business and technical process flows that are followed when a customer service representative tries to book an appointment. See Booking Activity Appointments (End User) for information about how to book appointments.

Appointment Booking Business Process Flow

The following describes a typical customer service center business process.

1. A request for service arrives from a customer.
2. The customer service representative opens a service request and selects an activity plan to generate activities for this request.
3. The agent clicks the Book Appt button in the Service screen or the Activities screen to get a list of appointment choices for the selected activity.
4. The customer service representative, who sees these choices in a dialog box, selects a time slot and clicks Confirm.

   If none of the time slots work for the customer, the customer service representative clicks Cancel.

Appointment Booking Technical Process Flow

The following describes what happens within the ABS when the business process in Appointment Booking Business Process Flow takes place.

1. When the customer service representative clicks the Book Appt button, the ABS searches for available time slots using the Earliest Start field and Latest Start field (if a value is supplied) to limit the search.
2. If the earliest and latest start are not specified, the ABS chooses from all of the time slots within the ABS horizon.

   The ABS returns time slots and reserves these with a timed lock.

   NOTE:  The ABS returns possible time slots for the Earliest Start Time only.

3. If the customer service representative confirms a time slot, the ABS marks the selected slot as permanently used. The ABS then frees the other reserved time slots, writes the details of the selected slot to the activity record, and returns control to the client.

   If the customer service representative cancels the time slot, the ABS frees all of the time slots reserved for this activity and returns control to the client.

   NOTE:  If the representative does not cancel these time slots, the time-out releases the slots.