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“The agent said there was nothing available” almost always means the calendar really had nothing to offer. This page is how to find out which rule emptied it.

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Check the calendar itself, not the call

Free slots answers the exact question the agent asks, from outside the call:
An empty slots object is a real answer, and it is the answer the agent got. Now change one thing at a time.

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The two settings that empty a diary

1

Notice: minNoticeMinutes

The default is 180 minutes. On a calendar that closes at 17:00, nothing is offered for today after 14:00, and a lead called at 16:00 hears about tomorrow at the earliest. Re-read with ?minNoticeMinutes=30 to confirm that is what is doing it.
2

Hours: weeklyHours

A day left out of weeklyHours is closed, not open. A calendar carrying only mon offers Monday and nothing else, forever. Check the days as well as the times.
3

Then the rest

maxDaysOut caps how far ahead it will look, slotDurationMinutes has to fit inside a window (a 60-minute appointment never fits a 09:00 to 09:30 window), slotBufferMinutes widens every booking, and dateOverrides can close a specific day.
?lookaheadDays= and ?minNoticeMinutes= override the calendar for one read only. That makes the loosened read a question rather than a change: you learn what would open up before you change anything for real callers.

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Timezones

A calendar has its own timezone, and that is what the opening hours mean. Slots come back in it unless you ask for another with ?timezone=. This matters most when the calendar’s zone and the contact’s differ. Hours of 09:00 to 17:00 on a calendar in America/Chicago are 15:00 to 23:00 for a contact in Europe/London, and both are correct. Set the contact’s timezone so calling windows and spoken times are theirs, and leave the calendar’s zone as the business’s.
A calendar connected from another product reports its own zone, and not every product exposes it on every endpoint. When a linked calendar’s times look shifted by a whole number of hours, check the zone that product has, not the slot arithmetic here.

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What the agent is reading on the call

Two different things, and the difference explains most “but the slot was free” reports.
  • {{availability}} in the prompt is a snapshot, formatted and injected when the call starts. It does not change during the call.
  • The slot-finder tool, when the agent has it, reads a store refreshed around the call rather than that snapshot. A slot the agent locks mid-call is held immediately, so another call in progress stops offering it.
So an agent without the tool is reading a moment that has passed, and one with it is reading something close to live. Either way the booking itself is the authority: the seat is claimed as the appointment is written, and a slot that went in between comes back 409.

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When it is not availability

  • The contact is on do-not-call. Nothing is dialled at all, so no availability is ever read. Check doNotCall on the contact, in Contacts without a CRM.
  • The campaign names no calendar. An agent with nowhere to book does not offer times. The calendar a campaign uses is set on the campaign; see Calendars and booking.
  • The appointment was refused, not the slot. A booking outside the hours comes back invalid_time, which is a different failure from slot_unavailable and points at your startTime, not at the diary.