You can set an availability schedule for your chat agents by enabling operating hours on your account. If you are also using offline forms, you can display this schedule to customers during your offline hours.
Understanding operating hours
When you enable operating hours, any agents signed in to Chat outside of the scheduled hours have their availability status set to Invisible. Agents cannot manually change their availability status during offline hours.
You can apply a single offline hours schedule across your entire account, or, if you have multiple departments enabled, you can apply customized schedules to each department. However, the operating hours applied to the entire account override the operating hours applied to departments.
By default, when operating hours are set, agents cannot receive messages from end users outside of the scheduled work hours.
However, in some cases, your end users may be able to use custom Javascript to override your operating hours, and send messages to your agents' accounts, even if they are Invisible. Contact Zendesk's customer support for more information.
Setting up operating hours
- From the dashboard, select Settings > Account > Operating Hours tab.
- In the upper-right corner of the page, click On.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. For details, see Displaying operating hours on the widget.
- Click Save Changes.
- For changes to take effect, make all agents log out, click your profile icon in the upper-right, thenn select Leave session, and log in again.
Displaying operating hours on the widget
If you've configured the Offline Form to appear (Settings > Widgets > Forms > Offline Form), you can also show operating hours show on your offline widget.
To display operating hours on the widget
- From the dashboard, select Settings > Account > Operating Hours tab.
- Select the Display Operating Hours check box.
- Click Save Changes.
Reviewing operating hours
Where you review your schedules after you've set them up depends on whether you're using account schedules or department schedules.
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.
30 comments
Andrew Chu
Quick question on this feature: Can you confirm the purpose of having department schedules setting up? To prevent agents from turning on chat outside or scheduled hours, or to prevent chat request to be initiated for that added department, or both?
There's a scenario where agent 1 is mapped to 2 service groups A and B, each has separate schedule. Group A's schedule is 24hrs while Group B's schedule is just 6hrs in the day.
Per checking I see that agent 1 can go online anytime as service group A should be available 24/7. But when agent 1 being online to serve group A's request will he/she receive requests coming from group B, saying that it's now already outside of the 6hrs scheduled for group B?
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Diosa
The purpose of department schedules is to keep the department from staying online beyond of the specified operating hours. So, in your scenario, Group B will go offline even if agent 1 is online, because it is already over the department's operating hours.
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Andrew Chu
Thanks Diosa for your comment. I get it now.
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Cheeny Aban
Creating a schedule is available under Chat Professional and Zendesk Suite Professional. We suggest that you check your plan to verify if this function is included in your plan. If yes, please reach out to your Account Executive to have your account updated.
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Hannah Voice
Do operating hours also apply to Zendesk Messaging or is it just Live Chat? If they do apply to Zendesk Messaging, how do they then work with Social Messaging? For example, if we had operating hours of 9am-5pm everyday, we couldn't stop a user sending a Facebook message outside of those hours. If agents were marked as Invisible (per the operating hours), what would happen to that Facebook message?
Additionally, I understand Departments aren't relevant for Zendesk Messaging but how could we set multiple operating hours schedules in that case, or could we only set it at the account level where ALL agents are shown as Online?
Thanks!
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Ramin Shokrizadeh
Hannah Voice Messaging does not rely on the Chat operating hours schedules, instead it uses business schedules set in Support and it is enforced by using a step inside of Flow Builder and a specific schedule. This gives you flexibility to set it how you like, some Messaging customers treat the channel differently from Chat where the account has urgency/more real time responses and it becomes more asynchronous where response time could be hours/days instead of seconds/minutes with Live Chat.
You can look at this post in setting up a schedule in Support: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408842938522-Setting-your-schedule-with-business-hours-and-holidays
Here is the post about flow builder and the business schedule condition: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838909210-Using-Flow-Builder-to-create-bot-flows
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Hi-Rez Studios Inc
I set up 2 department hours and when the first shift had their hours start they got this error. But the hours had just started for them.Anyideas?
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Naze Perik
👍
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Jah Tan
Hello!
Just curious for chat department operating hours - since Lite and Team plan does not have the capability to custom change the operating hours, what is the standard chat operating hours set for these packages?
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Ramin Shokrizadeh
Jah Tan For accounts without operating hours set, the status of the widget will be based on the statuses of the agents logged in. If you have one or more agents set to online/away, the widget will appear online and available to accept chat requests.
If the agent is in specific departments, the department status will be shown in the pre-chat form dropdown for the visitor to select.
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Jah Tan
Thank you for this, Ramin! Appreciate the info! :)
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Dekbi
We may need to investigate further regarding this.
Kindly contact us using this article Contacting Zendesk Customer Support so we could check further and ask for further details about this matter.
We'll be waiting for you!
Have a good day!
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Rina
It seems a bit complicated that Messaging scheduled can only be set by accessing the Chat system, rather than having a setting in Admin (like we do for Talk and for standard tickets, or main operation hours).
Can anyone explain why some settings are used in chat, and other settings are disabled or have to be accessed elsewhere?
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Evelyne
I am Evelyne from Zendesk Support Team, thank you for posting this question. I totally understand that it’s a bit confusing to set the Operating hours for Messaging within the Chat tool.
The explanation for this is that Messaging has been built within the Chat product and operating hours are tied to the chat agent status. For this reason, operating hours for Messaging are currently accessed from the Chat Dashboard.
I hope my answer clarifies why operating hours are set up this way. If you want, you can create a product feedback post with your concerns and suggestions for our Product teams to view and for other customers to upvote.
I hope this helps!
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Rogier Kerstens
I've created operating hours for departments in order to have a lunch break in it. This however causes the widget to raise a javascript error when customers want to show the operating hours.
Having two schedules for all departments seems to break something, causing the chat to stay offline completely.
How can we add a lunch break?
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Dane
Have you already followed the steps in Recipe: Setting up a lunch schedule for Zendesk Chat?
If you are still experiencing an issue, don't hesitate to contact our support directly.
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Gabriel
It looks like I will need to take a closer issue at this, so I have created a ticket on your behalf. Please, kindly look into your emails and we can continue from there!
Thanks!
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Danielle DeCosta
We have set up operating hours however we're finding that once these hours have ended, if a client does not close their chat window they can reply at any time and reopen their chat even if it is after hours. Is there a way to stop this from happening? For example, we had a chat that ended at 4:30pm. The client never closed their chat window, our operating hours end at 4:45pm and she was able to send us another chat at 5:06 pm through the same window.
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Jan
We really have no control over a chat visitor's behavior so it is normal to sometimes see chat visitors keeping the chat window open and becoming active again beyond operating hours. While we currently have no native way to avoid such scenarios, our team has come up with a workaround that helps prevent them, using a Chat Trigger.
Please check out this guide for more info and instructions - Recipe: Chat trigger to notify the end of operating hours
Feel free to contact Zendesk Customer Support if you'd need further assistance.
Best,
Jan
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Viktor Hristovski
Hello all,
we have 2 departments with different operating hours.
When the first department is open, but the second one isnt, there is an option to leave an offline message for the second department, but the ticket that gets created has a tag zopim_offline_message, and thats all. There is no indication that the person chose the offline department and is leaving a message for them, so the ticket goes into our main queue. I also am not able to add a tag via the chat triggers, as the message has no information on the department chosen (even though its possible to choose the department on start and it says offline)...
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Dan Hunt
Why do I only have a zendesk support and API tab, not one for Operating Hours?
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Ramin Shokrizadeh
Dan Hunt I see you got this answered on your ticket with your account having Messaging enabled
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Jenise Bishop
Hi, I am running into the same issue as Dan Hunt (message about this from March 2023). I do not see it available in my Chat settings to set up operating hours. Please advise as soon as possible.
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Francis Casino
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Alex
Hello guys,
We have started to receive chats, that are outside of the operating hours.
We have double-checked the settings, and nothing has been changed from our side recently.
Would you be able to advise why it's started to happen recently?
Thank you for your help
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Joyce
Did you recently implement the widget to an app using our Chat SDK? If so, Chat SDK doesn't take operating hours into account. It only considers if a department is online (at least 1 agent online within it) and if the account is online (at least 1 agent online) when preparing a Chat session. This means that users will be able to pick a department on the pre-chat form after operating hours if those conditions are met.
To resolve this, you need to Customize the Chat experience with the following:
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Alex
Hey Joyce,
No, we did not change anything, nor the operating hours.
Any other reasons why it started happening?
Thank you
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Mayra
I use Messaging and I want to have different business hours. Is that possible? I didn't understand the previous answers.
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Jupete Manitas
If you're not organizing these regions by brand, this might require more effort and changes. However, it could be an alternative to requesting customers selection in the bot flow and apply the schedule. (Add business hours condition)
Another workaround or option that again depends on the nature of where you have your widget placed and how users access it would be to make use of the Make API Call step. This would really only make sense if, when a user opens the widget, there would be an API call that could be run to pull user information about that person, such as their location or timezone. An API call like that would be made to a tool or system of yours where you'd have that user information. If you happen to have something like that as part of how your customers access the widget, this could be an option.
Once you get the result of the API call, you could then use the Branch By Condition step in an Answer to direct the user to the appropriate schedule. This idea is similar to what I'd described before, but instead of the user selecting their location, the API call would be doing that behind the scenes. But again, this option won't be viable if there isn't any resource with user location information accessible by an API call.
In general, there would need to be something that differentiates one location from another that could be built into the Answer in order to branch to separate schedules. Whether that be input the user provides, a response from an API call with that information, or through the use of entirely different widgets is what separates these solutions. We hope this information helps!
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Mathilde
Hi,
Is it possible to display operating hours in a Help Center article? We regularly change the schedule for our chat depending on team meetings and other events where we have to close the chat for a few hours. Each time we update the schedule in Zendesk, and then we also have to update all the content blocks with the operating hours for our Help Center. Since we support different time zones, there are a lot of different content blocks to update.
I was wondering if it would be possible to display the schedule in the Help Center so that it would automatically update in the article when we update the schedule in Zendesk. Also, how would this work with time zones? Could the system automatically display the correct time zone for each country?
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