Siebel Field Service Guide > Setting Up and Using Scheduling >

About Configuring the Appointment Booking Display

You can change the information displayed in the Book Appointment dialog box, as well as the format in which this information is displayed, to suit your company requirements.

The following are some suggestions on changing the displayed information:

• By default, the employee is not shown together with the available time slots. This is because many service companies, particularly those scheduling partners or people working on commission, do not want to allow employees to see the names of the field service engineers being scheduled. This can help avoid favoritism. If a company does want to display the employee names together with the available time slots, the administrator must expose employees within the Abs Result Pick Applet.
• By default, the Book Appointment dialog box displays the start and end times of the time window. The time windows are generally longer than the actual duration of the activity. Set the time window to equal the length of the activity if you want to allow customer service representatives to view the exact times for the activities instead of the time window ranges.

  TIP:   Planned Start and Planned End are available in the Abs Result Pick Applet's list columns. However for these to be displayed on the user interface, the corresponding applet Web template items (Planned End, Planned End - SR Time Zone, Planned Start, and Planned Start - SR Time Zone) must be activated. These Web template items are inactive by default.

  NOTE:  You can change the time window values in the Administration - Scheduling screen > Time Windows List view. See Creating Time Windows for Scheduling for more information.

• To force the return of only one time slot per employee, set the Earliest Start and Latest Start for the activity to less than the time window (see Adding Schedule Information for Activities (End User) for more information). For example, if the time window is 40 minutes, setting the Earliest Start to 11 A.M. and the Latest Start to 11:30 A.M. will ensure that only one slot is returned for each employee with the available time and appropriate skills.

Why Would Time Slots Not Be Displayed to Users?

Occasionally, users may state that they are not seeing time slots when they know some are available. Assuming that time slots are definitely available and the skills required are correct, this situation can occur because the time slots are being held. Time slots are held for the customer service representative viewing them until the representative clicks Cancel or the ABS timeout limit has been reached (see Table 29 for more information about the ABS - Timeout parameter). When only a few time slots are left, one user may hold them all.

To mitigate this, in high-volume call centers, it may be more appropriate to set the ABS - Timeout parameter to a low value—for example, one minute. Alternatively, you can also reduce the value of the ABS - Default Number of Slots parameter so that fewer slots are offered to each user.