Using Schedules In Your Playbooks
Using a SCHEDULE allows you to deal with multiple timezones easily, limiting when an action (phone call or email) can be performed based on the the local time of the contact. For example, let's say you have a list of contacts all across the United States, having four different timezones to deal with. Adding a schedule of Mon-Fri 8am-5pm to your playbook steps will check the local time of the contact before initiating the action (e.g. if John Smith is EST and it's past 5pm EST, the schedule will SKIP John Smith and move on to the next contact... otherwise if the current time is still between 8am-5pm EST, the schedule will allow John Smith to be called).
Schedules must be created by an Admin user under SETTINGS => YOUR ORGANIZATION => SCHEDULES.
Once created, they can be added to your playbook steps:
The contact's local time and timezone are automatically calculated and displayed in FrontSpin based on their State/Province or based on the area code of their Phone Number (if no State/Province is found). You can see these details on the contact's page right below the CALL and EMAIL buttons:
PLEASE NOTE: The local time and timezone auto-calculation only works in the United States. International timezones and local times are not calculated and will default to MST, therefore schedules are only to be used for list of contacts in the United States.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE: Schedules only affect when the call/email activity can be started. It does not affect when those activities finish. For example, let's say you start an email blast from your playbook at 4:45pm in the contact's local time (well within the schedule of 8am-5pm)... all those emails will continue to go out until they are finished, which may be later into the night (e.g. the schedule does not stop things from happening at 5pm).