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About Configuring the Book Appointment Dialog Box

To suit your company requirements, you can change the information that appears in the Book Appointment dialog box and the format for this information.

Some suggestions about changing the information that appears follow:

• By default, the employee name does not appear with the available time slots. Many service companies, especially companies that schedule partners or people working on commission, do not want to allow employees to see the names of the field service engineers to schedule so that the company can avoid favoritism. If you want to display the employee names with the available time slots, then you must display employees in 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:   The Planned Start field and Planned End field are available in the list columns of the Abs Result Pick Applet. However, to display these fields in 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 active. These Web template items are inactive by default.

  NOTE:  You can change the time window values in the Time Windows List view of the Administration - Scheduling screen. For more information, see Creating Time Windows for Schedules.

• To return of only 1 time slot for each employee, set the Earliest Start field and Latest Start field for the activity to less than the time window. For example, if the time window is 40 minutes, then set the Earliest Start field to 11:00 A.M. and the Latest Start field to 11:30 A.M. to make sure that only 1 slot is returned for each employee with the available time and appropriate skills. For more information, see Adding Schedule Information to Activities (End User).

Held Time Slots

Occasionally, users might not see time slots when they know some are available. This situation can occur because the time slots are held. Time slots are held for customer service representative viewing until the representative clicks Cancel or the ABS timeout limit is reached. When only a few time slots are left, a single user can hold all of the time slots. For more information about the ABS - Timeout parameter, see Table 11.

To mitigate this situation in high-volume service centers, you can set the ABS - Timeout parameter to a low value (for example, 1 minute). Alternatively, you can reduce the value of the ABS - Default Number of Slots parameter so that fewer slots are offered to each user.