Appointments

Appointments and their respective schedules are specifically designed for booking meetings with external clients. They offer robust features to manage how and when clients can book time with you or your team.

There are four main types of appointments:

1. One-on-One
2. Group
3. Round Robin
4. Collective

One-on-One Appointments

One-on-one appointments are the simplest type, designed for a single client to book a meeting with a single host.

• Host: A specific team member is assigned as the host. This can be your personal schedule or a team member’s schedule.
• Availability: Determined by the assigned host’s working hours (including custom schedules or date-specific exceptions) and existing conflicts.

Group Appointments

Group appointments allow multiple external clients to book the same time slot with a single host, ideal for webinars, workshops, or group consultations.

• Host: A single team member is assigned as the host.
• Capacity: You can define how many clients can book a single group appointment slot.
• Availability: Determined by the assigned host’s working hours and existing conflicts, similar to One-on-One appointments.

Note: Both One-on-One and Group appointments rely on the availability of a single designated host.

Round Robin Appointments

Round Robin appointments automatically distribute bookings among a pool of available team members. This helps balance workload or ensure clients can book with the next available person in a department.

Distribution Methods

There are two distribution methods used to assign Round Robin appointments:

• Maximize Availability:

  • Goal: Offer as many open slots as possible by ensuring someone is available.
  • Assignment Logic:
    1. Prioritize members with a higher weighted priority (if set).
    2. If tied, assign to the member who was least recently scheduled.
    3. If still tied, use a random tie-breaker.

• Equal Distribution:

  • Goal: Distribute meetings as evenly as possible across all pool members.
  • Assignment Logic:
    1. Assign to the pool member with the fewest total bookings.
    2. If significantly ahead, temporarily consider the member unavailable.
    3. If tied, assign to the least recently scheduled member.
    4. Adding/removing members resets distribution counts for fairness.

Each member in a Round Robin pool can follow the main schedule’s working hours or have custom weekly schedules and date exceptions.

Collective Appointments

Collective appointments are used when a meeting requires multiple specific team members or representatives from different teams to attend simultaneously.

• Availability: A time slot is only shown if all required participants are free.
• Required Participants: Can include co-hosts and members from multiple pools.
• Selection Logic: Each participant is selected based on the pool’s distribution method (Maximize Availability or Equal Distribution).

For example, if Co-host A, one member from the Design pool, and one member from the Development pool are required, the slot is only available if all are free.

Like Round Robin members, co-hosts and pool members can follow the main schedule or have custom schedules and exceptions.

How Availability is Determined

Several factors determine if a slot is available for booking:

Schedules

• Main Schedule: Each appointment schedule has primary weekly hours (e.g., Mon-Fri 9 AM–5 PM) and defined time slots.
• Custom Host Schedules: Individual members can follow custom schedules for flexibility.
• Date-Specific Exceptions: Override normal schedules for holidays, special events, or other exceptions.

Conflict Checking

To prevent double bookings, the system checks for conflicts for all potential hosts:

• Existing Monomize Appointments: Any confirmed appointments already booked via Monomize for a host will make them unavailable during that time.
• Internal Calendar Events: The system will also check for internal team events. Busy events will also be treated as conflicts.

Booking Rules

Settings on the appointment schedule control when and how clients can book:

• Duration: The length of each appointment slot (e.g., 30 minutes, 1 hour).
• Buffers (Time Between Slots): Time added after each appointment to allow breaks or travel. E.g., a 60-minute appointment with a 15-minute buffer results in the next slot starting 75 minutes later.
• Minimum Advance Notice: How far in advance a client must book (e.g., "at least 24 hours in advance").
• Booking Future Limit: How far into the future clients can book (e.g., "up to 60 days from today"), possibly limited by the schedule's overall end date.
• Daily Booking Limit: Maximum number of bookings per day for the schedule. Once reached, no more slots are available for that day.

The system generates potential slots based on duration and buffer, then checks each slot against all availability rules (host schedules, conflicts, booking window, daily limits) to determine final bookable times.