IMPORTANT NOTE: This information is for internal use only. Please do not share details of the calculation logic with clients to maintain confidentiality. If this information is requested by a client, give a brief overview, and focus on key factors that are included in the calculation and when the calculation takes place.
Overview
Lobby wait times are calculated by taking a number of factors into account. This calculation is the core of the wait times offering that is part of Lobby Management. It allows Coconut to calculate how long a new walk-in for a given service can expect to wait before being served. The key factors to this calculation are:
Which staff are available in the Lobby and what services do they perform?
What Appointments / Absences do those staff have in their schedules for today?
Does the selected service require a room? Is that room booked today?
Is the branch open?
Calculation
Lobby wait times are calculated using the following logic:
Gather all services that are available for walk-ins at that location
Gather all Appointments that aren’t Completed/Cancelled & all Absences that aren’t Cancelled
Create a ServerQueue for each staff/service combo that is available at that location
Add busy blocks to each ServerQueue based on any appointments / absences found for today
This is also where opening/closing hours of location are considered
If Rooms-Services and Coconut Room Bookings are being used, this is also where Room unavailable blocks will be added to all necessary ServerQueue’s
Gather all Queue Appointments & Unassigned Appointments that are currently waiting to be seen at this location
Loop through each Queue Appointment & Unassigned Appointment and “place” it into the first available ServerQueue, marking its expected start and wait time value
Return the wait times for each service as the next available start time / wait time until that service can be seen
When are wait times calculated
This calculation is often used in the Client View, Branch Locator, Callback Service (kiosk), Admin areas (add new walk-in), Lobby TV, and Lobby. Wait times are re-calculated from scratch in all of the following situations:
Any creating/updating of Queue Appointment, Appointment, or Absence
Any time a staff refreshes or loads a new page in the admin area of the app (when a full page load is triggered)
When notifications are generated that include wait times
If the wait time is shown there, any time the kiosk / client view / branch locator is opened
Additional Resources
For more information on how to set up Lobby and Lobby Wait Times, please refer to this article.