Overview of Service Scheduling

Avoid disruptions in service by making sure that your resources are scheduled optimally and efficiently. Using Scheduling in Customer Service Hub, you can plan and schedule service activities for your customers by bringing together all your resources.

Understand the scheduling experience

Scheduling, which is built on top of Universal Resource Scheduling (URS), provides an efficient way to schedule resources for service activity. It considers the availability of employees, facilities, and equipment to plan schedules accordingly. It also helps customer service organizations with improved service quality by preventing over-scheduling.

Scheduling scenario

The following scenario helps to understand how the scheduling capability lets you manage your service activities seamlessly:

Contoso bike repair schedules repair services for their customers. To facilitate this process, Contoso needs to bring together the following information:

• Geographical locations where they need to offer their services.
• The personnel and equipment they need to perform those services.
• The types of bike repair services they offer.
• Work hours during which they perform their services.
• Capacity and expert level for all personnel.

Contoso can benefit from the scheduling feature by quickly catering to their customers with their repair services. With the various scheduling entities, they can plan service activities for their customers by considering the availability of resources, facilities, and equipment.

Let's see how Contoso accomplishes the task:

Step 1: Create organizational units
Organizational units are the locations where Contoso provides service to their customers. More information: Create and manage organizational units

Step 2: Create resources
Contoso lists the resources required to perform the services.

In this example, two resources (contacts) Bert Hair and Gilda Moss are created. Similarly, two more resources (facility/equipment) are created as Bike repair workbench - 1 and Bike repair workbench - 2, which are required to perform the service. More information: Create and set up bookable resources

Step 3: Set work hours for the resource, resource group or facility/equipment
The availability of the resources is defined in the work hours section. More information: Set work hours for the resources

Step 4: Create resource groups
The resources are aligned in resource groups or resource categories.

In the example, Bert Hair and Gilda Moss are grouped as Technicians and Bike repair workbench - 1 and Bike repair workbench - 2 are grouped as Workbenches.

More information: Create and manage resource categories

Step 5: Create a service record
Contoso now collates all the above inputs to create a bike repair service record for the customer. They also specify the resources/resource groups they will need for the service. More information: Create or edit a service in Service Scheduling

Step 6: Create a service activity
A service activity is defined to look for the next available time slot to schedule the service and align resources as per requirement. More information: Schedule a service activity

Step 7: Book the service in the schedule board

The schedule board displays all the service configurations at one place to quickly schedule a service. More information: Use the schedule board to configure service activity

Understand scheduling entities

Scheduling entities are grouped under the following logical groups:

Scheduling

• Resources
  Anything that needs to be scheduled can be termed as Resources. This can be personnel, crews, service centers, company assets (equipment), accounts, or contacts.

  More information: Create and set up bookable resources

• Facilities/Equipment
  Facilities and equipment are resources you'd use to perform services for your customers. Facilities can be physical spaces like service bays or conference rooms and equipment could be tools or other assets.

  More information: Add facilities and equipment to schedule service

• Resource Categories
  With Resource categories, you can group your bookable resources by type. For example, you can create categories like technician, supervisor, subcontractor, vehicle, or equipment.

  More information: Create and manage resource categories

• Services
  To make scheduling services quick and easy, it's helpful to predefine the specifics of the services you'd provide to customers.

  More information: Create or edit a service

• Service Activities
  Create a service activity by finding the next time resources are available for a service.

  More information: Schedule a service activity

• Fulfillment Preferences
  Choose and customize how to display schedule assistant results, like with neat hourly appointments or morning and afternoon time windows.

  More information: Fulfillment preferences

Tools

• Schedule Board
  The Dynamics 365 Customer Service schedule board provides an overview of resource availability and bookings you can make.

  More information: Use the schedule board to configure service activity

Settings

• Organizational Units
  Your company organizes its business by geography, function, or other areas. You can create organizational units that reflect your business.

  More information: Create and manage organizational units

• Business Closure
  Prevent scheduling resources on holidays and other non-working days by defining business closures.

  More information: Set when your business is closed

See also

Set up the Service Scheduling experience
Access scheduling in the Customer Service Hub and Customer Service workspace
Install Service Scheduling from Power Platform
Service Scheduling FAQ