Enable customers to schedule service visits with a simple web experience

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to New and upcoming features in Field Service. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Enabled for	Public preview	Early access	General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts	Oct 1, 2021	-	-

Business value

A significant portion of a support agent’s time is spent talking with customers and taking their preferences into account to schedule or reschedule a service visit. By adopting the customer self-scheduling feature, you'll empower your customers to schedule service visits at their convenience, directly from their devices. This will improve their experience by providing them with flexibility, reducing scheduling errors and unwanted rescheduling. It will also reduce your organization's back-office costs by reducing support call volume associated with scheduling and freeing up those resources to focus on other value-driving activities.

Feature details

This is an update to the preview of the feature that was released in 2021 wave 1.

With self-scheduling, you empower your customers to schedule service visits based on their preferences, without having to speak with a customer service agent.

The self-scheduling feature is based on the Power Apps portals, providing a responsive customer-focused interface that can be accessed from any device. The feature follows a similar template-based deployment pattern to that of the track my technician feature, previously released in 2021 wave 1. Your customers can access self-scheduling from the customer experiences home page. You can theme and brand the experience to match your own company styles, giving a consistent look and feel across your own web properties.

Your customers will gain access via direct invitations, which can be automatically sent to new or existing customers. As part of this update, you can also invite an individual customer manually if needed. When customers are scheduling, they will be offered available time slots based on real-time resource availability, location, and skills. This update ensures that suitable resources are automatically assigned to optimize for least travel duration. This logic is based upon the resource setup that you have already configured in Dynamics 365 Field Service. Also part of this update, when customers select a service time, the booking incorporates the expected travel duration and adjusts the start time of the field technician such that the technician arrives at the customer's expected time.

You can also collect important pre-service customer information as part of the scheduling request, which can provide guidance to service technicians when they visit. This feature is initially supported for onsite service visits only.

In this update, we have also improved the experience for administrators by adding validations and error messages while configuring an incident type for self-scheduling.

See also

Enable customers to self-schedule service appointments in Field Service (docs)