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Team Scheduling
Team Scheduling

Allow clients to schedule with any available member of teams you define.

Seth Wilson avatar
Written by Seth Wilson
Updated over 9 months ago

Team Scheduling is only available to TimeZest subscribers on the TimeZest Professional plan.
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TimeZest's team scheduling feature allows you to define teams of users— either in TimeZest, or from existing Project and Service Teams in ConnectWise PSA (if you use it). You can then request a client schedule a time with the team, and TimeZest will automatically schedule the appointment with an available user. Just like when scheduling with a single user, TimeZest will take into account business hours, holidays, and existing calendar entries when scheduling with a team.

Create a team

Scheduling With Teams

Scheduling with teams works just the same as scheduling with individual users in TimeZest. Once you've defined your teams(s), they'll appear in the "Resource" drop-down in the TimeZest pod. Select the team, select the appointment type and click Schedule.

TimeZest will send an email to the client asking them to schedule an appointment with the team, with a link for the client to click on to allow them to do that. TimeZest will display a list of times where at least one team member is available, and when the client selects a time, TimeZest will schedule an appointment with an available user.

Defining Teams

TimeZest supports 3 types of teams: Service Teams, Project Teams, and TimeZest-Defined Teams.

  • Project Teams and Service Teams are the teams already defined in ConnectWise PSA (as part of the Service Board and Project Board setup tables). These teams are managed in ConnectWise PSA, and TimeZest will automatically stay updated as you change the users who are in each team.

  • TimeZest-Defined Teams are teams defined entirely in TimeZest, and don't appear in your PSA. You can use these teams to define ad-hoc teams, perhaps to cover a holiday, or to define teams that don't quite match to a project or service team in ConnectWise PSA.

Each team has an internal name and an external name. We use the internal name when referring to the team in TimeZest, your PSA, and with your users. The external name is used in any communication with your clients – in the emails we send, and in the appointment web UI. If you don't set an external name, TimeZest will use the internal name when communicating with clients.

You can also select the scheduling algorithm which TimeZest will use when allocating appointments to members of a team:

  • Round Robin — TimeZest will allocate appointments to team members on a round-robin basis, so it won't allocate an appointment to a team member again until all other team members have had an appointment allocated to them. This means that all team members will get a roughly equal number of appointments, but it may mean that clients have fewer options to choose from. If the next user to be scheduled is not available, TimeZest will use a scheduling algorithm to look at the next 4 resources in line to find the user who is best available.

  • Maximum Availability — TimeZest will offer the maximum number of appointment slots that it can to clients. This will mean that some users get far more appointments than others but makes it more likely an earlier or more convenient appointment is available for a client. In this mode, when there is more than one user who can accept an appointment for a particular time, TimeZest will choose one at random. We generally recommend this setting is used, unless you have a specific reason to use round-robin scheduling.

To add a team from ConnectWise PSA, go to Settings > Teams, and click Add New Team. You can then select the board and team (for Service and Project Team), or the name for the new team (for TimeZest-Defined Teams).

For Service and Project teams, TimeZest will tell you which users in the team have been activated. 

Once a team has been created, you can edit its details, and — for TimeZest-Defined Teams — its membership by clicking on it in the Teams list.

Once you've created a team, it will appear in the TimeZest pod in the resource dropdown along with all your existing users and teams. Simply select it to ask the client to schedule an appointment with any member of the team.

Caveats

There are two caveats to be aware of when using team scheduling:

TimeZest will only schedule activated members in a team. Regardless of whether a member is added to a team, either in TimeZest or in your PSA, if that user isn't activated in TimeZest, then TimeZest won't schedule any appointments for that member.

TimeZest doesn't enforce ConnectWise PSA's restrictions on Project Teams. ConnectWise PSA only allows schedule entries for a project ticket to be created for members who are part of the project team for the project to which the ticket belongs. TimeZest doesn't check or enforce this, so if you attempt to schedule a project ticket with (for example) a service team with different members, ConnectWise PSA will reject the schedule entry we try to create, and your clients will see an error. We hope to address this in a future release.

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