Scheduling in Service Desk

[Eleanor Hart]

I'm looking for a mechanism that would allow for easy scheduling of in person appointments from a service desk project.

The generic use case is: a customer emails us to get help with their office desktop (we're an IT shop) and we want to send a technician out to meet them in person. Right now we ask them to call us to set up an appointment and someone has to manage the google calendar. Ideally there would be some sort of mechanism that would allow the customer to select an appointment time via the portal.

I've looked around for an add-on, but can't seem to find anything. Does anyone have a recommendation or know whether or not this is possible with service desk? 

[Darshanaa _ServiceRocket_]

Hi there @Eleanor Hart ,

Hope all is well. I recently came across this question and I'm happy to say that our team is in the midst of implementing something very similar to your ask above.

We currently have a prototype of this idea and would love to hear your thoughts/feedback on our prototype. 

Please let me know if you/your team would be interested to test it out.

Thanks & have a great day! :)

[Adam Kassoff]

@Darshanaa _ServiceRocket_  My company is also in the IT sector with a similar use case and would be very interested in seeing the prototype. 

[Darshanaa _ServiceRocket_]

Hi @Adam Kassoff 

That's great! I'd love to get in touch and chat more on this. Could you please provide me with your contact information so that I can email you the details?

[Jason Finke]

@Darshanaa _ServiceRocket_  Greetings! I am also in need of this and would be interested in any potential solution.

[Darshanaa _ServiceRocket_]

Hi @Jason Finke!

Thanks for your interest in our solution :) 

Could you please provide me with your contact information so that I can get in touch with you via email? 

[Filip Kohout]

Hi, it's been a while since the original post. How do you plan on onsite service at the customer?

[Lauren Sheehan]

Our team is looking for something similar as well. A way for customers to view our availability and schedule a virtual call (zoom or teams).

[Darshanaa _ServiceRocket_]

Greetings @Lauren Sheehan ! Has your team found the solution for the problem above? 

[Ivan Tovbin]

Hi Eleanor,

That's actually quite possible. Create a date/time type custom field and add it to the request form on your portal. You can even go as far as making it mandatory for your customers, so that every time they raise a support ticket they'll have to fill this field out before they can submit their request.

More info on setting up your request types is here.

[Eleanor Hart]

Hi Ivan,

Interesting solution! Do you know if there is there a way to have that validate against a calendar of open appointment slots? I worry that letting them select any date/time without the validation would result in confusion and we'd still have to manually validate against a Google calendar and follow-up with folks who selected times/date that aren't available.

Thanks,

Eleanor

[Ivan Tovbin]

Not out of the box, no. I suppose some 3rd party addons can probably do something like that.

[Gerald Onuorah]

Hi What are the third party addons that can achieve this?

[Ivan Tovbin]

Searching through the Marketplace, I think this might do the trick:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1219043/meeting-mate?hosting=cloud&tab=overview&_ga=2.149384438.1744553609.1549970607-1741309663.1548425436

[Eleanor Hart]

Thanks, Ivan! This is the closest I've seen to what we need. I really wish YouCanBookMe would write a Jira Service Desk app!

At this point I think we're going to go with YouCanBookMe and try to figure out ways to gracefully combine the two products without a direct integration. I think if our agents respond to requests with a link to our BookMe site and we try to make it match the look and feel of our Help Center as much as possible, then it shouldn't be too jarring of an experience for our customers. I hope :)

[PhilSpo]

Hello Eleanor,

I noticed this:

https://zapier.com/sign-up/?next=%2Fzapbook%2Fcreate%2FJIRA6DevAPI%2FYouCanBookMeDevAPI&selected_apis=JIRA6DevAPI%2CYouCanBookMeDevAPI

Phil

[Eleanor Hart]

Thanks, Phil! One of our programmers ended up writing a custom solution using the JSD and YCBM APIs. It doesn't provide the end user UI we were hoping for but it gets the data where it needs to be and so far sending folks to a different URL to do their actual booking hasn't been that burdensome.