Assistant Can Not Book Appointments

 

 

Diagnosing and Fixing Calendar Booking Hiccups

Conversational booking is a refined tool call set from our system but there are some things associated that we cannot control such as your prompt, your CRM calendar settings and relevant integration setup. This guide should take you through every scenario to check to triage your calendar booking settings to make sure you are on your way and booking reliably.

 

Use this mnemonic to help you triage: C-A-S-P-E-R

 

Triage Order [ C-A-S-P-E-R ]:

1. Calendar [Syncing]- does the assistant have access to the calendar to reference?

2. Ability [Tools] - does the assistant have the ability to do it?

3. Settings [CRM Settings] - Does my CRM calendar have actual availability?

4. Prompt [Instructions, KB, Temp] - have i told the assistant the correct protocol i want for booking or given it confusing instructions?

5. Event [Tool called & meta data] - Did the tool get called? If so is the meta data correct? What does it say?

6. Refresh [Refresh associated resources] - If all else fails it could be your connection, refresh your connection, calender and tools

 

Calendar:

We need to make sure that our assistant has access to a CRM calendar. To do this, lets navigate to our assistant and we should see a calendars tab, click on that:

 

Click on Add Calendars to open the calendar menu: 

Sync your calendars with CRM and then click add to assistant to go through the verification process. The verification process should be a first order of triage because it runs a simulation for booking and only verifies the calendar if the simulation is successful.

After verification (denoted by the green check mark in the upper right hand corner), then click add to assistant to add the calendar to your assistant. If all is well up until this point then we are good to go on this step.

 

Ability:

Giving the AI access to the calendar but no tools to give it the ability to do anything with it is like giving a calendar to an employee that sits in a glass box. It knows there is a calendar but doesn’t have any ability to access it, check it and book to it. So, we will add tools to give it the ability to do things with the connected calendar.

 

There are a handful of pre-build tools to help you with full calendar management such as check availability, book appointments, reschedule appointments, cancel appointments and check the contact’s current appointments - giving the AI a suite of ability to manage you and your clients calendar.

The required ones for conversation booking are check availability and book appointment - the two steps in booking appointments. If you do not have those, click on add function and in the pre-built tools add those two - they should be the first two:

 

 

Settings:

We have access to our calendar (that has been verified) and we have the ability to book on the calendar - now we need to check our CRM calendar settings. This is not an uncommon bottleneck in booking because CRM has a really robust calendar infrastructure meaning there are a lot of cool settings - but also a lot of cool ways to mess up your availability.

The best way to check your objective availability on a CRM calendar is to navigate to your calendars, then calendar settings where you will see all of your calendars:

 

Then we want to click the 3 dots on our calendar, then click share which should bring up a popup where we can get our permanent calendar link. Copy the permanent calendar link and then paste it into another tab - this will show you the objective availability from that calendar.

 

 

If the availability in this page doesn’t line up with what you think it should be, check a couple things:

• Your Google / 3rd party calendar integration: This shares and blocks off availability based on the integration, a lot of times the 3rd party calendar will be blocked off because it is a personal calendar which blocks off your CRM calendar.

• General calendar settings: Some settings may limit availability as a feature such as Look Busy, or date ranges but also may conflict and consume your only availability for that time - just do a quick audit of your settings and integrations to make sure your availability lines up with what it should be.

 

Prompt*:

This is the most likely occurrence and I am going to group Knowledge Base and temperature settings with this because they all have an objective effect and contribute to output generation.

A lot of the time - this is just a learning curve of AI - users will the prompt as a place to dump information and context in hopes to help the output of the assistant during conversations (use knowledge base for domain / business knowledge, FAQ, objection handling, etc for flawless execution of this data). 

What this tends to do is confuse the assistant or interfere with its understanding of what you want it to do. AI is very good at following instructions - too good, and humans are naturally not objective communicators so where we tend to instruct and provide context may be confusing to the AI model especially if prompts are not well organized. Things like ## Additional Information sections that go deep into scenario handling, business info (again, knowledge base is the best place for this stuff) - the AI may read into as instruction even though it wasn’t meant as that. It's just the way computers simulate thinking.

Making sure your prompt is concise, direct-to-the-point, and clearly structured may mitigate any scenario where the LLM could get confused.

That also leads to temperature. Temperature controls how deterministic or random the output from an AI is. The lower the temperature, the more direct the AI will follow instruction and the more objective the output. Vise versa for raising the temperature. Keeping your temperature at 0.1 - 0.35 (0.35 is default) is a great guide line especially when utilizing tools to make sure the AI follows procedure deterministically. Lastly, your knowledge base - this is the least likely case. The embeddings from the knowledge base can be very powerful to hand answers and suggested outputs to the AI model for domain / business knowledge, FAQ handling, objection handling, pricing, and more - but without being mindful, putting not ideal past conversations and bad data can also lead to improper suggestions being fed to the AI when generating output. Overall, just make sure you utilize the tool infrastructure to keep your assistant on task and on target by using this guide: Where things go for reliable and consistent output:

• Prompt: Personality (identity), response guidelines, style guardrails, important points and the instruction set. Make your prompt concise, detailed and to-the-point.

• Knowledge Base: Domain knowledge, business specific knowledge, FAQs, objection handling, pricing information (simple pricing info), and key-value type trained output (FAQs as an example)

• Tools: Use tools for a couple of ways to scale your prompt, use context injection or tool calls as a way to inject conditional instructions or logic, use tool calls to get data or do something with data (appointment booking as an example) and you can use tools to scale your prompt by calling to the parameters needed

 

Event:

Everything is looking good thus far but we are still having issues around proper booking structure. Lets take a look at our conversation logs and look for “task performed” - this happens when a tool is used and the meta data associated with it. If your AI is giving improper times: 

• Make sure you see a task performed where it pulled the available timeslots - and click on the tool to look at the meta data. Confirm the times that it was able to get from CRM are correct - if there is a discrepancy, this is a CRM thing - go look at your calendar settings because oauth is not involved at this step.

• Make sure you dont have conflicting instructions or confusing prompt near instructions around booking - AIs are smart but they are not intuitive and unclear language may be interpreted differently, play with your verbiage around booking (or just use “ 6. Get your availability and use that to book an appointment with the user” - remember, keep it simple.)

 

If your AI is giving correct times but not booking correctly: 

• Check the meta data on the tool call - this will give you the output that CRM has given. Once scenario may be around authorization, that is related to oauth. Bad request could be instruction injection because the AI is trained to book back to local time, even when discussing with client timezones - let the AI do what its trained to do with some slight pushes in protocol.

• Your connection via oauth may be misconfigured or just need refresh: to get times doesnt require oauth, the only thing that requires oauth in the whole process is the book appointment tool. So if all is great up until that point, it may be time to do a hard reset.

 

Refresh (and test):

If all else fails, refresh everything - remove and add back your tools to the assistant, delete and resync your calendar, reset oauth, etc. And always will go back to check your prompt - for those who have worked alongside me in buildouts can vouch that literally one word can change an AI’s output entirely - for the good or the bad. Simplify your prompt, make it more concise, get rid of unnecessary information, get rid of unnecessary markdown (just use ## - that's all), and simplify and build your way up.

 

Common Calendar Mistakes

1. No Slot Available

Solution 1: Check if your Google Calendar is synced with the CRM Calendar. If synced, the full-day/recurring events might block your schedule.

Solution 2: Check for any conflicts if you use a simple calendar, also check the availability of the calendar. However, if you’re using Round-Robin Calender, go to “Settings” → “Your profile” and ensure that you have availability with the right timezone.

Solution 3: Cross-verify the time settings format, i.e., AM/PM. This setting might go unnoticed by many users due to its effectiveness and use.

Solution 4: Scroll down to the bottom in the profile settings. Check if there is any conflict in the calendar and take the necessary steps accordingly.

 

2: Appointments not showing on your go CRM calendar appointments.

1. Go to the calendar configuration setting and make sure to select the right user with whom the appointment has been scheduled.

2. Visit the calendar from left navigation and at the bottom right make sure to select the calendar that you want to see and use.

3. If the CRM calendar shows Google or Outlook appointments in abundance, then you should consider their connection as broken. To fix this issue, you need to re-integrate the same with the respective users and calendars.

 

3. Double Booking Blues - How to Avoid Appointment Conflicts

1. These kinds of conflicts occur when Google or Outlook are not in sync with the CRM calendars. Hence, make sure Google and Outlook calendars are integrated and linked properly with each other.

To cross-verify, you can go to the calendar tab and select the respective users and calendar. If you see your Google/Outlook appointments as well as the appointments booked in your CRM account, then it’s all syncing properly.

2. Check your calendar configuration and make sure you have set the maximum booking per slot to 1.

3. If you are using multiple calendars in Google or Outlook, then you need to choose any one of the calendars as your primary one.

For the other calendars that you use, besides the primary calendar, you will have to enable the check for conflicts option in the CRM Calendar. You can do this by going into Settings > My Profile > Conflict Calendars configuration.

 

4. Disappearing Time Slots

1. You might lose your potential leads if they’re not able to see any free slots. This happens because some events in your Google/Outlook calendar are marked as “Booked” or “Busy”. On the other hand, events or dates marked as free show clear slot availability.

To avoid this, check your 3rd party calendar for any added events or schedules. They might be blocking your availability.

2. Sometimes a glitch is created in the process of integration between the Google and Outlook calendars. To fix this, remove the Google or Outlook integration and then reconnect them. Always double-check if you are able to see appointment slots in your calendar.

3. Double-check your Profile availability and timezone if you’re using a group/round-robin calendar.

4. Double-check your calendar availability.

 

5. Contact got reassigned to another user when booking an appointment

1. If you don’t want the contact to get reassigned to another user when they book a call/appointment, then please enable/check this option from the calendars(reference image attached below).

Go to calendars > edit calendar > Notifications & Additional Options > Who should receive this notification? > Enable/check the option “skip assigning contact if the contact has already an assigned user”

2. If you want the contact to be automatically assigned to the user they are scheduling with, then you can disable the “Auto-assign Contact” option from the calendar. A reference image is attached below.

Go to calendars > edit calendar > Notifications & Additional Options > Who should receive this notification? > Disable/uncheck the option “skip assigning contact if the contact has already an assigned user”

 

Bottom Line

Errors are common in the CRM calendar setup. However, all you need is to fix them promptly without any complications. This guide discusses the most common mistakes of the CRM calendar, their reasons, and the ways to fix them.

Finding solutions for the above-listed complications can be tough for you, hence we have collectively provided solutions for your common problems! Additionally, if you still do not understand these solutions, then you can contact our experts to get your job done easily.