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Support with | Live chat and messaging Professional or Enterprise |
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
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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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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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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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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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
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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Francis Casino
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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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Ramin Shokrizadeh
Daniel Hunt I see you got this answered on your ticket with your account having Messaging enabled
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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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