Appointments management overview
<This topic is in draft form only - it has been constructed solely from the corresponding requirements documentation and supporting use cases>
Understanding the needs, wants and concerns of current and prospective tenants is at the heart of all forward-thinking housing organisations wishing to build strong and lasting relationships. Satisfaction surveys consistently show that keeping to appointments is ranked very highly by tenants and is the cornerstone for nurturing trust and confidence in all aspects of customer engagement, not solely around repairs and maintenance. The opportunity to record and track any type of housing staff appointment across the entire system, with consolidated visibility being provided to all those with managerial responsibility, significantly reduces the potential for such commitments to be missed. The ability to create any category of appointment – home visit, consultation, interview, property viewing, tenancy acceptance sign-up, etc. – and match it to a system component or focus area – a contact, a contact group, an asset, an agreement, a rent account – also provides consistency of service in the booking and fulfilment process. Mapping user accounts to these specific appointment categories then ensures that appropriate resources are deployed correctly, upholding the highest levels of customer satisfaction i.e. the scheduled appointment is conducted by the right subject matter expert. The mechanics for creating system wide appointment transcends different user accounts and is aligned to their customised role types. So, a system user fulfilling, say, an office administrator role can be granted access to generate appointments on behalf of others. Furthermore, these intrinsic rules configured for each user account also control the appointment types that are applicable to them and therefore determine their eligibility for each potential booking.
As a prerequisite, each staff member's inclusion within the appointment scheduling process must be confirmed via the 'Available for Appointments' attribute, configured within their user account record. Their availability can then be determined through the allocation of an appointments calendar framework, whether that be an internal diary managed within Civica Cx Housing - labelled Cx Diary - or an external Microsoft Exchange calendar - labelled Exchange. Where Cx Diary is the preferred appointment method for an individual staff member, a corresponding internal resource diary must also be created and linked to the relevant user account - one against which system wide appointments can then be scheduled and tracked. Once these prerequisite settings are applied, resource availability is determined from their free diary / calendar slots across a defined time period. Where an internal Civica Cx Housing diary is employed, these can be configured in one of two ways: slot based or time based. A slot based diary comprises a number of adjacent, equal time periods in which an appointment can be booked, with the duration of an appointment being a minimum of one slot or any number of consecutive slots that most closely match the time required. In contrast, a time based diary is more flexible and accepts appointments for the exact time required. Where an external Microsoft Exchange calendar is employed, these automatically operate within a time based approach.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of appointments management, including: