Calendars
Configure how appointments get booked, appointment length, booking hours, who they route to, and the reminders around them.
When an AI employee schedules an appointment, it finds availability using your calendar: booking hours, appointment length and spacing, and concurrency limits. If the target team member has a connected external calendar, careCycle also checks it for personal conflicts and creates the event there, so appointments appear in both careCycle and their external calendar.
You manage calendars from Configure in the sidebar, under the Calendars tab. careCycle created a starter calendar when your Receptionist's number was provisioned; most agencies begin by reviewing and adjusting it rather than creating one from scratch.
Calendars are shared building blocks. One calendar can back your Receptionist, several campaigns, and transfer fallbacks at once. Each calendar in the list shows a "Used by" badge listing exactly which campaigns and routing groups rely on it, so check that before editing. A calendar that is in use cannot be deleted until it is unassigned everywhere.
The editor has four tabs: Basics (name, description, and duration), Limits (how often this can be booked), Routing (how the agent is picked at booking time), and Workflows (reminders, confirmations, and follow-ups).
Basics
- Name: the name your team sees everywhere this calendar is used, for example "30 Min Medicare Review".
- Description: a short note about this appointment type, shown on the customer's booking page.
- Duration: appointment length in minutes, from 5 to 240 in 5-minute steps.
- Meeting type: how the appointment happens.
- Phone Call (AI agent), the default: at the appointment time, the AI calls the customer from your business number and transfers them to the assigned agent. The customer just waits for the call, no dialing in.
- Phone Call (agent-initiated): the AI never calls. At the appointment time, the assigned agent gets a "Call now" prompt and dials the customer from the softphone. With Whole organization routing no agent is assigned, so your team works these appointments from the Appointments page, or assigns one to an agent to send them the prompt.
- Switching between the two phone call types also switches upcoming booked appointments of this type when you save.
- In-person and video call options are coming soon.
- Display the caller ID on the booking page: optionally show customers the number their call will come from, so they know what to answer.
Limits
These controls decide how many appointments can be offered and when:
| Setting | What it does | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Time between slots | How far apart offered start times are. 30 means a new slot every 30 minutes. | 5-240 minutes |
| Max options offered | How many slots the AI employee offers on the call. | 1-5 |
| Minimum notice (hours) | The earliest an appointment can be offered, in hours from now. Optional. | 0+ |
| Concurrent limit | How many of these callbacks can run at the same time before the rest wait in line. Only shown for the Whole organization routing mode; in the other modes the assigned agent's own calendar controls overlap. | 1-20 |
Two optional toggles narrow availability further:
- Limit booking date range: restrict this appointment type to a specific date window with an earliest and latest date. Useful for seasonal pushes like AEP review appointments.
- Limit booking hours: restrict when this appointment type can be booked, narrower than your organization's operating hours. Add one or more windows, each covering selected days (with Weekdays and Weekends presets) and a start and end time. Windows must fall inside your business hours, and days with no window cannot be booked. Leave the toggle off to simply inherit your organization's operating hours.
Routing
The Assignment mode decides who each appointment goes to at booking time:
- Customer's agent (default): always assign to the agent already attached to the customer record.
- Routing group: pick an agent at booking time using a softphone routing group. Choosing this reveals a routing group picker and its routing flow.
- Whole organization: no agent assignment or calendar sync. For AI phone calls, the AI hands the call to a routing group at appointment time. For agent-initiated calls, no routing group is required: your team dials the customer directly.
Routing group assignment and Whole organization AI phone calls use your routing groups, so set those up first.
Workflows
Workflows are the messages around each appointment. Two things to know before editing them:
A confirmation text is sent the moment an appointment is booked, always, in addition to the workflows below. And if a workflow's trigger time has already passed at booking (for example a 24-hour reminder when the appointment was booked 20 hours out), that workflow is skipped.
Each workflow is a simple rule with three parts:
- Trigger: before the event starts or after it ends, plus how long (minutes, hours, or days). A 60-minute before-start trigger is the classic reminder.
- Condition (optional): only run if the appointment status is one of Scheduled, Confirmed, Cancelled, Completed, or No-show. Status is checked at the moment the workflow fires.
- Action: send an SMS to the customer (email is coming soon). Write the
message with template variables: type
{in the editor to insert one.
Every new calendar starts with three sensible defaults, which you can edit, disable, or delete:
| Default workflow | When it fires | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 24-hour confirmation text | 24 hours before start, if still Scheduled | Reminder with the date, time, and a confirm link |
| 1-hour reminder text | 1 hour before start, if Scheduled or Confirmed | "Your appointment is coming up today" |
| No-show text | 5 minutes after the end of a No-show | "Looks like we missed you," with a reschedule link |
Template variables
| Variable | Inserts |
|---|---|
{CUSTOMER_FIRST_NAME}, {CUSTOMER_LAST_NAME}, {CUSTOMER_FULL_NAME} | The customer's name |
{AGENT_NAME} | The assigned agent's name (not available in Whole organization mode, where no agent is assigned) |
{ORGANIZATION_NAME} | Your organization's name |
{EVENT_DATE}, {EVENT_TIME}, {EVENT_TIMEZONE} | The appointment's date and time in the customer's timezone |
{CONFIRM_LINK}, {RESCHEDULE_LINK}, {CANCEL_LINK} | Self-serve links for the customer |
Deleting a workflow only stops future bookings from scheduling its messages; anything already scheduled for existing appointments still fires.
Where Calendars Are Used
A calendar can be attached in three places:
- Campaigns: each campaign that books appointments points at one calendar. A campaign with a Book Appointment behavior (or a routing group that falls back to appointment booking) cannot go live without one.
- Routing groups: as the fallback when no agent answers a transfer, so the AI rejoins and books instead.
- Your Receptionist: through the Book Appointment behaviors you configure on the Receptionist page.
You can duplicate a calendar from the list to create a variation (for example, a shorter version of the same review appointment) without starting over.
Automated Follow-Up
Beyond the reminder workflows above, careCycle can also automate the appointment call itself and no-show recovery. See Automated Appointment Handling for the Appointment Callback Pulse and no-show handling.