Zoho Desk : Defining Business Hours and Holidays

Zoho Desk : Defining Business Hours and Holidays

Customer support teams in an organization may follow their own business hours and work in shifts based on different time zones. The customer support personnel at the Japan office and the one in the Indian office will have different work schedules and holidays. In such circumstances, you must be able to select a time zone, define business hours, and set up holidays so that Zoho Desk factors that into actions like assigning tickets, triggering escalations, setting due times, etc. Zoho Desk allows you just to do that. You can define multiple business hours with different time zones and holidays. The holidays you add will be considered outside of business hours. Once created, you can improve your support workflow by setting up SLAs, time-based automation rules, and blueprints based on your business hours.


For instance, your customer support personnel in India creates a ticket. As the ticket details meet the escalation rule criteria, it is escalated to an agent in Japan. Since the time zone is different, it would be better if the ticket is escalated when the support team in Japan is available.

Availability
Business Hours and Holiday List are not available on the Free edition. Here is a table to look up their availability for all other editions of Zoho Desk:

Feature
Enterprise
Professional
Standard
Business Hours
Unlimited
1
1
Holiday List
Unlimited
1
1

To define business hours and holidays:
  1. Click the Setup icon (  ) in the top bar.
  2. Click Business Hours under the General menu.
  3. On the Business Hours page, click Add Business Hour.
    If you have already created a business hour, click New Business Hour in the upper right area.



  4. In the Business Hour Details section, do the following:
    • Enter a Name for the business hour. For example, New York Office or Eastern Daylight Time NY
    • Select the Time Zone from the drop-down list
    • Specify the business timings. You can select between:
      • Always - If you work 24*7 or round-the-clock.
      • Specific Working Hours - If you work for specific hours throughout a week.
      • Custom - If you have a customized business timings for the days of the week.
    • Drag the top or bottom of the time block to customize the start or end time. Click the Close icon ( X ) on the time block to remove hours from a day.
  5. Click the Off toggle to On beside Associate Holiday List, then click, Create New Holiday List, to add holidays as exceptions.
    Note: You can also associate an existing holiday list (click, Associate Existing Holiday List) to this business hour.



  6. On the following window, do the following:
    • Enter a Name for the holiday list.
    • Click on a date in the calendar, enter a name for the holiday and then click Add.
      You can select multiple dates as a range for adding extended holidays.
      Click on a date again to add more holidays to this list.
    • Click Save Holiday List to return to the Business Hour page.
  7. Click Save.
    Now you can use this business hours in automation rules.
You can edit or delete a business hour from the Business Hours List page. Before you delete a business hour, you must dissociate the SLAs and the Time-based rules that are associated with it.

Notes:
  • You can associate only one holiday list with a business hour.

Behavior of SLAs with Business Hours
You can create service level agreements that will comply with your business hours in Zoho Desk. While creating an SLA, you must enter the resolution time. Sequentially, the resolution time will set the due date for the tickets. The behavior of business hours and the logic behind setting the ticket due dates are explained with an illustration below:

Let's take, for instance, the following business hours:
Monday to Friday: 9.00 A.M. to 6.00 P.M.
Saturday: 9.00 A.M. to 1.00 P.M. &
Sunday: Holiday

Resolution Time Set in Hours
For example, you configure an SLA with the resolution time of 50 hours. In this case, a ticket coming in at 10.00 A.M. on a Monday will be due on the following Monday at 11.00 A.M. Here is how it is calculated:
Business hours remaining on Monday: 8 hours (10.00 A.M. to 06.00 P.M.)
Business Hours on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (9hours*4days): 36 hours 
Business Hours on Saturday: 4 hours (9.00 A.M. to 1.00 P.M.)
Monday: 2hours (9.00 A.M. to 11.00 A.M.)
Due on: Monday @ 11.00 A.M. at the end of 50 hours.

Resolution Time Set in Days
For instance, you configure an SLA with the resolution time of 1 day. In this case, the due date will be set based on the exact business days, and it will not consider the working hours. Please note that the business day calculation will include Saturdays (as in the illustration), though it has got only 4 working hours. 

Here are a few sample cases, when you setup the resolution time as 1 day:
Tickets created: 
  1. At 10.00 A.M. on Monday, will be due at 10.00 A.M. on Tuesday if it is not a holiday. 
  2. At 10.00 P.M. on Monday, will be due at 06.00 P.M. on Tuesday if it is not a holiday. 
  3. At 10.00 P.M. on Friday, will be due at 01.00 P.M. on Saturday if it is not a holiday.
  4. During the after hours on Saturday or Sunday, will be due at 06.00 P.M. on Monday.

Deactivating Business Hours
To deactivate a business hour:
  1. Click the Setup icon (  ) in the top bar.
  2. Click Business Hours under the General menu.
  3. On the Business Hours page, move your mouse pointer over the business hour you want to deactivate.
  4. Click the On toggle to Off on the business hour.
  5. Click Save.



The business hour will be deactivated and moved to the Inactive list.

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