Business Hours

What business hours are for

Business hours tell Zuzana when your support is open. Not as a label on a page, but as something the product acts on: a call that arrives at 22:00 is handled differently from one at 10:00, and a reply deadline should not tick over a weekend you were never working.

Setting them takes two minutes and is worth doing before you turn on phone or live chat, or agree an SLA with anyone.

Setting them up

Go to Settings → General → Account → Business Hours.

• Enable Business Hours 🔛 The master switch. Off means Zuzana treats you as always open.
• Timezone 🌍 The schedule is read in the team's timezone, set on the General tab of the same page. This is the business's timezone, not the individual agent's, so the hours mean the same thing no matter where the person looking at them is sitting.
• The weekly schedule 📅 Tick the days you are open and set an opening and closing time for each. An unticked day is simply closed, which is how you handle weekends.

Note: Overnight hours work. Set a day to open 22:00 and close 06:00 and it is read as running through midnight rather than as an empty window.

Different hours per market

Under the weekly schedule you will find a table of your markets. Any market listed there can have its own hours, and a market you leave alone simply uses the team default above.

This is what you want when your Danish support runs 09:00 to 16:00 but your German line is open until 18:00, or when one market keeps Saturday hours and the others do not. Each market is checked against its own schedule and its own timezone.

What actually uses them

These are the things that read your business hours. Everything else in the product ignores them.

• After-hours call overflow ☎️ If you have an overflow number configured and after-hours overflow enabled, calls that arrive while you are closed are transferred there instead of ringing an empty room.
• IVR flows 🔀 A phone menu can branch on whether you are open, so callers hear the right greeting and the right options at 20:00.
• SLA deadlines ⏱ An SLA policy has a Pause deadline outside business hours option. With it on, the clock stops when you close and starts again when you open, so a Friday evening ticket is not already late by Monday morning. The per-market override is applied automatically.
• Live chat 💬 Chat closes with your business hours, even while agents are still online: the chat widget shows nobody available, the AI stops promising that a person will join, and no new chats are offered to agents until you open. Agents keep chats they are already in. To keep chat open while agents are online, switch on Allow Online Outside Business Hours (off by default) under Settings → General → Helpdesk, Live Agents tab. See Online status and live offers.
• Auto-unclaim and side conversation follow-up ⏳ With Only count business hours on (same Helpdesk settings, Automation tab), Auto-unclaim after inactivity and Side conversation follow-up only count time while you are open, so nights and weekends are skipped. Both use the team hours, not a market's own hours.

Note: Business hours do not switch the AI off. If the AI is answering, it answers at 02:00 too, which is usually the point of having it. If you want it to behave differently at night, that belongs in a policy or a workflow.

Good to know

• Leaving business hours off is a perfectly valid setting for a team without phone and without SLAs. It means always open, and nothing behaves oddly as a result.
• The SLA option cannot be switched on until business hours exist for the team, so set these up first if you are planning SLAs.
• There is no holiday calendar. Public holidays and the week between Christmas and New Year are not automatic, so if closing properly matters for your phone line or live chat, untick those days while they last and put them back afterwards.
• Changing the schedule takes effect immediately. There is nothing to publish or rebuild.