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About Appointment Booking for Siebel Scheduler

This topic describes the business and technical process flows that apply when a customer service representative tries to book an appointment. For more information, see Booking Appointments for Activities Using Siebel Scheduler (End User).

Business Process Flow for Appointment Booking

A typical business process for a customer service center follows:

1. A customer initiates a request for service.
2. The customer service representative creates a service request, and selects an activity plan to generate activities for the request.
3. The agent clicks the Book Appt button in the Service screen or the Activities screen to see 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 the customer does not want any of the time slots, then the customer service representative clicks Cancel.

Technical Process Flow for Appointment Booking

When the business process for appointment booking occurs, the following ABS processing occurs:

1. When the customer service representative clicks the Book Appt button, the ABS searches for available time slots by using the Earliest Start field and Latest Start field for the activity to limit the search.
2. If the activity does not include a value for the earliest and latest start, then the ABS selects from all of the time slots in the ABS horizon.

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

   NOTE:  The ABS returns possible time slots for only the earliest start time.

3. If the customer service representative confirms a time slot, then the ABS marks the selected slot as permanently used. The ABS then releases 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, then the ABS releases all of the reserved time slots for the activity and returns control to the client.

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