Appointment rescheduling agent
A customizable agent that scours calendars and shift rosters, identifies under booked or over booked slots, and sends rescheduling - forward or backward in time - offers
to customers via email, SMS, phone or push notification, to fill the gaps and balance the load
The unmet need
- Appointment based services ("scheduled services") face challenges in ensuring efficiency in a dynamic environment
- For example, a scheduled appointment is canceled by the customer, which creates an empty slot or,
a service provider cancels an availability slot where appointment have already been scheduled
- Such naturally occurring events make keeping an efficient and 'fair' system a challenge.
Usually requiring costly human intervention in order to review the changes and try to balance capacity vs demand while
maintaining the service level agreements (SLAs)
The value proposition
A customizable agent that scours calendars and shift rosters, identifies under booked or over booked slots, and sends rescheduling - forward or backward in time - offers to customers via email, SMS, phone or push notification, to fill the gaps and balance the load
A system that reviews the calendars, detects unbalanced capacity / demand sections, and issues reschedule offerings to customers, whether moving the appointment forward or backward in time
Example use case
- A patient cancels a future scheduled MRI scan appointment
- The system looks for appointments scheduled for a later time as candidates for filling the vacant slot
- The system sends an email/SMS/voice message to the customers of those appointments, suggesting to reschedule the appointment for the vacant time slot
- When an offer is accepted by one of the candidates, the appointment is rescheduled and the vacant slot is filled
The KPI
- Reduce the 'over / under capacity' (where service resources are idle or overbooked) time for a given time period
- Reducing manual resources needed to operate the schedules
The main requirements
- Should be workable 'out of the box' with predefined best practices configuration scenarios
- Enable non-technical users to fine tune the basic scenarios to accommodated different business and operational use cases
- Enable support / professional-services teams implement low level customization to the basic logic, without installing a new product version
The system logic
The system consists of two main processes: backward scheduling - which is the action of moving appointments backward in time, and forward scheduling - which is the action of moving appointments forward in time
Backward rescheduling logic
Forward rescheduling logic
The user experience
Customer
Customers receive rescheduling offers via Email, SMS, phone or push notification based on the service settings and can approve or reject the offer
Administrator
Administrators can decide if to activate or not the rescheduling agent per service, fine tune its settings and logic, choose the communication channels and the templates to be used and customize the messages. In addition, the administrator can view the rescheduling agent's performance and efficiency reports
The impact
The feature was released to selected test services, and showed a significant improvement in the efficiency of the appointment scheduling process. Due to the complexity of the logic that needs to be implemented per use case, the test run raised the need for a simulation tool to test the results of such a system before deploying it to production.