Some features described in this article require Teams Premium.
This article is intended primarily for users in your organization who will set up the Virtual Appointments app for staff members on their team. This can include managers, supervisors, schedulers, or other employees. Users who initially create a shared appointment calendar are automatically assigned the Virtual Appointments admin role for that calendar and can perform most of the tasks in this article.
If you’re an IT admin, see Manage the Virtual Appointments app to learn how to control access to the app in your organization.
Team members can find the app in the Teams app store, or you can share the installation link to help them find it. IT admins can use an app setup policy to pin the app for your organization, or team members can pin the app themselves.
Use the Virtual Appointments app in Microsoft Teams for all your virtual appointment needs. The app enables a seamless end-to-end experience for business-to-customer engagements, integrating schedules, analytics, and management options, all in one place.
You can schedule, view, and manage virtual appointments, get real-time status updates in a queue view, send appointment reminders, view analytics and reports on virtual appointments activity, and configure calendar, staff, and booking page settings.
Use it to schedule and manage appointments such as financial consultations, healthcare visits, virtual fittings, interviews, customer support, education office hours, and more. You can also publish an online booking page for your clients, customers, and patients to book appointments with your staff.
The app makes it easy to manage the complex scheduling demands of any organization. Schedulers can manage multiple department and staff calendars, as well as communications with internal and external attendees, from a single experience.
The virtual appointments are held through Teams meetings, which offer robust video conferencing capabilities. For example, a doctor can share their screen and review test results with a patient. Or, a banking advisor can request electronic signatures on documents, allowing them to close transactions remotely.
You get an experience that's tailored to your industry. Here are some examples of how you can use it in your organization.
With a Teams license, you can use basic Virtual Appointments capabilities that make it easy to schedule and join business-to-customer meetings. For example, you can schedule appointments in the calendar and external attendees can join through a browser without having to download Teams. Teams Premium unlocks advanced Virtual Appointments capabilities to manage and personalize the experience. These include a queue view of scheduled and on-demand appointments, SMS notifications, custom waiting rooms, and analytics.
To schedule and manage appointments in the app, you must first set up an appointment calendar. You must have the Virtual Appointments admin role to set up and manage most appointment calendar settings.
You can add up to 100 staff members to an appointment calendar. Each person you add will have their calendar displayed on the Schedule tab. Schedulers can then view their availability in the app and schedule appointments for them.
Next, add services to the calendar using the appropriate appointment type. Before you do that, it's important to understand the two different appointment types so that you can choose the appointment type that best represents the services offered by your organization:
This feature is now part of Teams Premium.
Attendees need a valid United States, Canada, or United Kingdom phone number before they can receive SMS notifications.
To send SMS notifications to attendees by default, turn on Send them text messages. Attendees receive confirmation and reminder text messages that include the Teams meeting link and scheduled appointment details. They can opt out of receiving the messages by replying STOP, or resume receiving them by replying START.
Keep in mind that schedulers can later choose to turn off the setting on an as-needed basis when they use the appointment type to schedule an appointment.
Admins can use the SMS notifications usage report to see how your workforce is using SMS notifications with virtual appointments.
You can link up to four forms for attendees to fill out each time a scheduled appointment type is booked. For example, you might require attendees to complete a registration form before they join an appointment.
When working with forms, keep in mind that:
When a scheduler uses the appointment type to schedule an appointment, they can then choose to include the form, remove it, or add any other forms that you linked to the appointment type. Attendees must fill out the form before they join the appointment.
If you're a healthcare provider, any information provided by you or patients in Teams (including the Forms app, Virtual Appointments app, meeting recordings if enabled by you, or any other Teams virtual appointments services) that's necessary for medical records continuity or retention purposes should be downloaded, copied, and/or notated directly in such records by you. This service does not maintain legal medical records or a designated record set.
This feature requires Teams Premium.
Enter a name for the service. For example, Drop-in appointment, Account opening, Prescription renewal, Loan consultation, or Tax preparation.
Your customers, clients, and patients can then choose the appointment type on your booking page to request an on-demand appointment with your staff.
If you're a Virtual Appointments admin, you can publish an online booking page where people can book scheduled and on-demand appointments with your staff.
This feature requires Teams Premium.
Here's an example of what a published booking page looks like.
You can customize and manage your booking page settings in the Bookings web app. To learn more, see Customize and publish your booking page for customers to schedule appointments and Customize and publish your booking page.
This feature requires Teams Premium.
The queue view on the Queue tab provides your staff with a dashboard to monitor all scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments for the day, with updates in real time.
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From the queue, schedulers can add a new booking, view relevant appointment details, and see appointment statuses throughout the day. They can also send email reminders to assigned staff and attendees and send SMS notifications to attendees for scheduled appointments. Staff can join and manage appointments directly from the queue.
When an attendee joins the waiting room, the status changes, and their wait time is displayed and tracked. The view automatically refreshes with color-coded updates so that changes can easily be identified.
The Virtual Appointments usage report in the Analytics tab gives you an overview of virtual appointments activity in your organization. The report provides key metrics such as total number of appointments, appointment duration, lobby wait time, and no shows. You can view detailed activity for virtual appointments scheduled and conducted through multiple scheduling entry points and drill down into individual appointment data.
The analytics experience depends on user role:
