When learners select an appointment topic, Salesforce checks the staff's availability based on the data that you set up, such as the mapping between topics and engagement channels.
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions with Education Cloud |
Learners and staff members can only schedule appointments for learners who have an existing case related to them. See Appointment Objects in Education Cloud.
When you create and assign multiple support staff teams to learners, learners can schedule appointments with assigned and unassigned teams based on their case record. For example, Stephanie, a student at Cloudy College, has two open cases: Academic and Financial Aid. Her Academic case is assigned to the Undergraduate Advising team, which includes Adam and Amy. A support pool handles the Financial Aid case. So Stephanie can schedule appointments with Adam, Amy, and anyone from the Financial Aid support pool.
Scheduling Appointments with Other Teams
By default, learners can't book appointments with staff members who aren't related to their case record. Only staff members can do so from the learner's record.
Stephanie would like to learn more about the Study Abroad program, but because she’s not currently in that program, she has no assigned advisors or teams for it. Her classmate tells her about a great Study Abroad advisor, Sam. Since Sam is only in the Study Abroad pool, Stephanie can’t schedule appointments with her directly. So she goes to the Study Abroad office to inquire about meeting with Sam. Frank is a front-desk worker in that office, and can see all available support pools. He can open Stephanie’s person account record and schedule an appointment with Sam. If the Study Abroad support pool is configured to use the Academic case, Salesforce relates the appointment to Stephanie’s Academic case, but doesn’t relate the pool or Sam to her case. However, her assigned advisor sees that the appointment occurred and can consider international study topics in future discussions.
Drop-In Availability
Show drop-in availability for appointments on a staff member's profile and in the learner's portal.
To see drop-in appointment times, create a shift that includes drop-ins and meets these criteria:
- The related engagement channels include at least an in-person channel.
- The related shift doesn’t include all topics. If it includes topics for drop-ins and scheduled appointments, Salesforce only shows the drop-in topics.
Salesforce doesn’t automatically account for non-working days such as holidays, time off, or weekends. Salesforce only checks shifts (and the absence of shifts) to determine your staff’s availability. See Considerations for Shifts.
By default, Salesforce displays the drop-in availability for the next 7 days, and you can customize that range to a maximum of 10 days. See Use Omnistudio with Education Cloud.