Introduction
The Virtual Appointments app in Microsoft Teams gives your business a central hub for all your virtual appointment needs. It creates a seamless end-to-end experience that lets you easily manage customer appointments, integrating schedules, analytics, and management options, all in a single app.
You can schedule, view, and manage virtual appointments, get real-time status updates in a queue view, send appointment reminders, view analytics and reports to gain insight into virtual appointments activity, and configure calendar, staff, and booking page settings.
Features that Virtual Appointment Offers
- Mobile browser join lets customers join appointments no matter where they are.
- Forms integration to streamline pre-appointment processes.
- Waiting room for customers.
- Bookings schedule within the Virtual Appointments app.
- Email confirmations sent to customers and staff.
- Management of appointment types, staff, roles, and the Booking page.
With Teams Premium, You Unlock:
- SMS text notifications with personalized confirmations and reminders.
- Custom waiting room with your organization’s branding.
- Queue view to manage On-demand and Scheduled appointments.
- Rich analytics, including individual, departmental, and organizational data.
Virtual Appointment: Same as Bookings? What's new?
The Bookings add-on was a popular tool for scheduling appointments in Teams, but it lacked some of the features and capabilities of the Virtual appointment application. The Bookings experience in Teams will soon be updated to match the web version, on Teams, ensuring consistent features across all endpoints.
The Virtual Appointments app gives an end-to-end B2C meetings solution that leverages Bookings as the scheduling engine.
Similarities
- Easily schedule appointments
- View upcoming appointments
- Manage their availability
New Features
- Features like Forms, Queuing & scheduler-initiated SMS reminders for appointments
- Real time meeting state update
- Chat with attendees in the waiting room lobby via Queue view
- Rich analytics shows virtual appointment usage trends to drive business outcomes such as no-shows