Appointment scheduling is a common function in many automated processes, executed by bots. This example describes the process of automatically scheduling a technician using a bot, without the need for an agent and without any waiting.
Prerequisites
Initially, the bot process starts with customer identification to ensure only the relevant person can perform the action.
A person who is not a company customer cannot perform this action; only company customers will have this option (as long as they do not already have a technician scheduled).
Secondly, API calls need to be configured to provide the following data to schedule the technician’s appointment:
- Check if the customer already has a technician scheduled
- Check available technician appointments (dates and times)
- Update the company’s systems with the date and time of the scheduled technician appointment (final confirmation)
- Conduct an eligibility check to verify if the customer is eligible to schedule the appointment/technician based on the details returned from the customer identification interface.
Important Notes
- Multiple customers may request to schedule a technician at the same time, but only the first to request the time will be scheduled. Therefore, the service call must be planned so that, if the chosen date is missed, the customer is notified and allowed to choose a new date.
- For a good user experience, we recommend first choosing a date from a list of available dates and then displaying the available hours on that day.
- After the appointment has been successfully scheduled, a completion message/confirmation message should be displayed.
This service is most common in chat and WhatsApp channels, but can also be implemented in additional channels such as Messenger & SMS.
