Recipe: Setting up a lunch schedule for Zendesk Chat

Zendesk Chat is a great way to keep in contact with your customers, and scheduling makes sure you have specific windows of live support. If you were to simply set up operating hours on your Chat account, you'd have one schedule: for example, Monday to Friday, from 9 to 5. That's a great start.

Now, let’s say you’re running a cool office where you let your employees go to lunch. Common enough, right? 

While this may not be directly apparent, you can, with a little bit of a workaround, configure your account so that your Chat goes offline at lunch, giving your agents (and your good self) a rest and some much-needed sustenance before heading back to the front line.

First off, you need to make sure your agents are all added to Departments. Head to Settings > Departments > Add department to get started - more on that in our article Creating agents and departments.

In this example, I have two departments: Best chat and Second best chat - and the same schedule applies to both. If you don’t already use departments, you can simply add all your agents to the same one.

Once you’ve created your department(s), you need to create your schedule. To do so, head to Settings > Account, and click on the Operating hours tab. Click on the Departments option, and create two different schedules - one for morning, and one for afternoon. Select the same days for each of them (Monday to Friday, for example), then configure the hours so that they each make up a half day. Make sure to leave whatever lunch gap you want between the two:

Morning schedule:

Afternoon schedule:

Make sure to click on Add or remove departments to apply these schedules to your department(s).

Voilà - you've successfully scheduled lunch for your entire team! If you wanted to make sure you still had coverage over lunch by staggering two different teams for maximum coverage, you could simply create two morning schedules (one from 8 to 12, the second from 9 to 1) and 2 afternoon schedules (one from 1 to 5, the second from 2 to 6), and assign different departments to each schedule as needed.

Now, go grab yourself a bite to eat - you’ve earned it!