Release notes Skedify 2021.Q3

New Features

LISTINGS - AVAILABILITY ALLOCATION AND RULES

Listings come into play when your typical appointment subjects (e.g the type of conversations your agents are having with your customers) and the scheduling rules accompanying those, actually differ from case to case depending on a specific item in a list (e.g. list of job postings, list of properties, list of projects, …)

A listing will force the Skedify plugin and Partner Booking Application to handle an extra set of rules on top of the subject planning rules. The possible extra rules are to limit to a certain number of subjects/agents/offices/meeting types for a listing.

With this release of Listings, the following possibilities are added to this powerful feature

• Only allow specific time-slots/appointment hours for a listing.
• Make specific agents bookable and exclusively available for a specific listing.
• If the location is configured for a specific listing that happens via the on-location channel, then this location will be used as the address for the appointment.
• Synchronise listings with your calendar system (Outlook, Google).

Listings is a feature that is available in the Amplify and Magnify packages and needs to be activated by Skedify.

You can find more information here.

AGENT PRIORITIZATION

Agent prioritisation is a feature that allows you to prioritise agents when multiple agents are available. 

This comes into play in the following use cases:

• When multiple agents with different costs are available (typically internal agents vs. external consultants), you want to offer internal agents first and only external consultants when internally nobody is available.
• When you know you need customers to make an appointment as soon as possible, you want to offer appointments slots as soon as possible to increase your conversion and to offer a better customer experience
• When agents with multiple expertise levels are available, agents can be ranked from 1 to 3 and offered in that order. Per subject you can define which expertise levels are offered.
• When only one expert has availability, you can offer non-experts to open up availability.

Agent prioritisation is a feature that is available in the Amplify and Magnify packages and needs to be activated by Skedify.

You can find more information here.

PRODUCT IMPROVEMENTS

• Renewed administration & office manager user interfaces.
  UI/UX improvements to increase ease of use, driven by an underlying upgrade in technology.
  This new administration module can be activated upon your request.
• Customer fields order customization.
  It is now possible to customise the order in which the customer fields should be displayed in the customer (C) step in the plugin flow. Only available in the renewed administration module. (Our ref. SKED-7603)
• General performance improvements. (Our ref. SKED-8264)

FIXES

Incorrect appointment state after customer proposes a time slot in response to an invite from an agent.

Previously, the appointment remained in an outgoing state when a customer proposes a time slot (without auto-accept configuration) in response to an invite/rescheduling request from an agent. This action should actually transition the appointment to an incoming state (meaning that the next action lies with the agent).

Not transitioning the appointment could give the agent the wrong impression that the next action lies with the customer. It would also result in an incorrect webhook event being sent when the agent accepts the proposed time slot (DateCreatedByContact instead of AcceptedByContact), possibly resulting in an incorrect state for integrating systems that respond to these events. (Our ref. SKED-7586)

Incorrect webhook event sent after customer chooses a time slot with an auto-accept configuration, in response to an invite from an agent.
A DateCreatedByContact webhook event was sent instead of a DateCreatedByCustomer event when a customer chooses a time slot with auto-accept configuration in response to an invite/rescheduling request from an agent. This action should actually trigger a DateCreatedByCustomer webhook event.

Incorrectly sending the DateCreatedByContact webhook event could result in an incorrect state for integrating systems that respond to these events. (Our ref. SKED-8051)

Incorrect webhook event sent when agent requests a rescheduling for an accepted appointment.
First a PossibilitiesChangedByCustomer event and then a PossibilitiesRequestedByContact event were sent when an agent requested a rescheduling for an accepted appointment. This action should actually only trigger the PossibilitiesRequestedByContact event to be sent.

Incorrectly sending the PossibilitiesChangedByCustomer webhook event could result in an incorrect state for integrating systems that respond to these events. (Our ref. SKED-8052)

Mandatory question field in the plugin does not recognize input.
​Adding a dot (.) at the end of a question label (for a specific subject) that is marked as mandatory resulted in the malfunctioning of the plugin field validation, causing the plugin to keep asking for input while an answer has already been provided. (Our ref. SKED-8165)

Impossible to change the earliest time slot field for a subject to 0 days without changing the latest time slot field as well.
Changing the earliest time slot field for a subject to 0 days without also changing the latest time slot field resulted in an error while saving. This could be worked around by briefly changing the latest time slot field, saving it and then reverting the field back to its old value but is not intended behavior. (Our ref. SKED-8228)

DEPRECATION WARNING

• Customer email address attribute will always return either a valid email address or null, instead of a valid email address or an empty string.
  
  When: Breaking change as from 2021-Q4 release (planned Jan 2021 - subject to change)
  
  Impact: Might impact all Skedify customers using webhooks and/or the Skedify API
  
  Detailed description:
  When an email address was not provided upon creating a customer (e.g. while creating an appointment), Skedify saved this as an empty string and returned it as such from API calls and webhooks.
  In the next release this will change to Skedify saving a ‘null’ value and therefore also returning a ‘null’ value from API calls and webhooks. This might cause some of the current API/webhook integrations to malfunction (depending on their set-up) if these cannot correctly handle ‘null’ values for this attribute.
  
  Actions to take:
  If you are not sure if this applies to your current Skedify setup or integration please double-check with your IT department or integration partner.
  Verify if your integrations are compatible with the customer email address attribute value being ‘null’ when it is returned from the Skedify API and webhooks.