Zendesk Schedules

Understanding and Using Schedules in Zendesk

Zendesk offers two types of schedules:

• Chat operating hours.
• Zendesk Support schedules

Zendesk Support Schedules

Account admins and owners can set a schedule for your Zendesk Support instance by selecting a time zone, defining business hours, and setting up holidays. If you don't provide 24/7 support to your customers, you can acknowledge your availability and give customers a better sense of when they can expect a personal response to their support requests. Even if you do provide 24/7 support, you can enhance your workflow by setting up views, triggers, automations, and reports based on your business hours set in your schedule.

Setting up a Zendesk Support Schedule

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Schedules.
2. Click Add schedule to create a new schedule. Or, click an existing schedule to modify it.
3. On the schedules page, enter a Schedule name and choose a Time zone.
4. In the Weekly schedule section, keep the preset business hours or modify them.
   • Each business interval must be at least 1 hour long. You can extend your business hours in 15 minute increments.
   • You can adjust the interval start time in 15 minute increments.
   • A schedule interval can't overlap a date boundary. If your business hours span midnight, you must define this as two separate intervals, divided by calendar day.
   • To move a block of time, drag the time block up or down on that day.
   • To change the start or end time, drag the top or bottom of the time block.
   • To remove hours from a day, click the X in the upper-right corner of the time block. The day displays Closed.
   • To add hours to a closed day, click anywhere on the closed day. A time block appears where you clicked.
5. When you are finished, click Save.
6. If you want to set any holidays as exceptions to your scheduled business hours, select Holidays and then click Add holiday.
   • Enter a Name for the holiday, then click in the first date field to pick a start date and click in the second date field to pick an end date.
   • You can choose a single day (by picking the same start and end date) or a date range (by picking different start and end dates). You cannot set a partial day holiday.
   • Click Confirm. You can add multiple holidays by clicking Add holiday again.
   • The holidays you add appear in your list of holidays in chronological order.
7. Click Save.

Deleting a Schedule

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Schedules.
2. Hover over the schedule you want to delete.
3. From the schedule options menu, click Delete.

Managing Holidays

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Schedules.
2. (Enterprise plans only) Click the name of a schedule on the Schedules admin page.
3. Click the Holidays tab.
4. From the list of schedules, hover over the schedule you want to edit.
5. From the holiday options menu, click Edit.
6. Make any changes you need.
7. When you are finished, click Confirm.

To delete a holiday:

1. In the Holidays tab of your schedule, click the options menu beside the holiday you want to delete, then select Delete.
2. Click Delete holiday to confirm the deletion. The holiday is removed from your list of holidays.

Applying Schedules to Tickets (Enterprise plans only)

If you're on an Enterprise plan and create multiple schedules, the first schedule in the list is your default schedule and is used for all tickets. You can create triggers to apply different schedules to tickets.

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
2. Click Add trigger.
3. On the Add new trigger page, enter a name and optional description for your trigger.
4. Add conditions for your trigger.
   • The conditions will determine which tickets get the schedule you set in the next step. For example, you might chose the condition ticket group is to set a schedule for a specific group. Or you might decide to set the schedule based on the ticket's brand or status. It's up to you.
5. Add the action Ticket: Set schedule, then select one of your schedules from the dropdown list.
6. Click Create.

How Schedules Affect Various Areas of Zendesk

• Business Rules: You can create views, SLA policies, triggers, and automations based on your business hours.
• Views: You can create views based on business hours by using any of the "Hours since" conditions.
• Triggers: You can create triggers based on business hours using the "Ticket: Within business hours" condition.
• Automations: You can create automations based on business hours by using any of the "Hours since" conditions.
• Reporting: You can use Zendesk Explore to build reports based on business hours set in your schedule.
• SLA policies: Any views, triggers, or automations based on business hours also take scheduled holidays into account and consider them as outside of your business hours unless you have set up a holidays trigger.

Remember, for Enterprise plans with multiple schedules, triggers, SLA policies, views, and automations based on business hours will use the schedule applied to the ticket. You need to define what schedule to use using a Zendesk trigger to apply the appropriate schedule. Otherwise the default schedule will be used (the first schedule in the schedule list).

Zendesk Support schedules do not apply to Chat operating hours.

Chat Operating Hours

You can set an availability schedule for your chat agents by enabling operating hours on your account. You can apply a single offline hours schedule across your entire account, or apply customized schedules to each department. When you enable operating hours, any agents signed in to Chat outside of the scheduled hours have their availability status set to Invisible.

Setting up Chat Operating Hours

1. From the dashboard, select Settings > Account > Operating Hours tab.
2. In the upper-right corner of the page, click On.
3. Select the type of schedule you want to set up for your account:
   • Account schedule is a single schedule that applies to your entire account.
   • Department schedules lets you apply multiple schedules to a department or apply multiple departments to a single schedule.
4. Select a type of schedule from the Online Schedule drop-down menu:
   • Daily: Allows you to set separate hours for each day of the week.
   • Weekday/Weekend: Allows you to set the same hours for every weekday (Monday to Friday) and both weekend days (Saturday and Sunday).
5. Ensure the check box is selected next to each day of the week that has operating hours. If a day has no operating hours at all, clear the check box next to it.
6. Adjust the sliders next to the days to select the hours agents are available to chat. Note that operating hours must be at least one hour and can be scheduled in 15-minute increments.
7. If you're using department schedules, click the link to also add departments to the schedule. Note that you must add at least one department to each schedule for department schedules to work.
8. If you want to show your operating hours on to visitors on the chat widget when the widget is offline, select the Display Operating Hours check box.
9. Click Save Changes.
10. For changes to take effect, make all agents log out, click your profile icon in the upper-right, then select Leave session, and log in again.

To display operating hours on the widget:

1. From the dashboard, select Settings > Account > Operating Hours tab.
2. Select the Display Operating Hours check box.
3. Click Save Changes.

Reviewing Chat Operating Hours

• To review account schedule hours, go to Settings > Account > Operating Hours tab.
• To review department schedule hours, go to Settings > Departments and click on the department with the schedule you want to review. The schedules appear in the Operating Hours section. The hours that appear here take into account all of the schedules applied to this apartment.