Working hours
By enabling Working Hours in the Inbox settings, you can set the available number of hours your customer support team groups will be functional. It refers to the time duration your agents would be available to take live chats and solve customer queries.
Service level agreements are calculated based on working hours. For example, if an SLA is set for 3 days, but the working hours are only 1 day per week, the effective SLA duration becomes 3 weeks. This is because it will take 1 day per week to calculate the SLA. By default, there are no working hours defined, so SLA calculations are not affected. However, when working hours are set, this calculation method comes into effect.
In this section, you can specify unique working hours for each day of the week or/and set different working hours for each of your groups.
In this article, you will learn:
1. Use case
When your team's working hours are set to 9 AM - 5 PM and a customer is requesting a resolution of a query at 6 PM, the customer cannot connect to any agent nor the ticket will be created/ queued. To avoid such a situation, you can display an automated message to the customer which explains the situation why live agents cannot converse with them, for a better user experience.
Away message
This customizable automated message is called Away message which will be displayed when a customer is trying to reach out to a live agent outside their working hours.
No agents are available right now. Our working hours are from 10 AM to 7 PM; Monday to Saturday, except for National and Public Holidays*
1. Handle chats/tickets if they are raised outside working hours
You can capture the incoming requests outside working hours by enabling Offline Chats which will record all the details and auto-assign them to agents who appear online.
- Live chats will be created as Open chat
- Email tickets will be created with Open status.
2. Chats/tickets are raised outside working hours but there are no working hours configured
If working hours toggle is enabled and there is no timelimit set for any group, then all the groups are considered to be outside working hours. Even if the agents are online and if the working hours are not set, the chats/tickets wont be received as expected (they will be converted to open chat/ open status ticket).
If you have enabled Working hours, it is recommended to set at least default timings.
2. Set working hours
Follow the below steps to set working hours:
Open Inbox > Settings. Search for Working hours.
Enable the working hours toggle.
You can configure working hours for the available groups.
If you do not have any group or if you want to have same working hours for all the groups, you can set default working hours. Click here to learn how to add groups.
Click the edit icon. You can Add/Edit the Away message and Working hours.
Click Set working hours. Working hours can be configured for each day.
A group can have varied start and end time (or) it can function only on few days (or) it can be functional for different timings on different days.
There can be multiple functional time slots for the same day.
Set away message for each of your groups.
Click Save. Once configured, all the groups working hours would be displayed here.
You must select the timezone of your workforce. This applies to all the groups/agents in this account. Even when a customer messages from a different timezone, their time would be converted into the timezone that is set, and only then a ticket is created if it falls within the specified business hours.
- If group-specific working hours are not configured, the default configuration will be used.
- You can set only one timezone for all your groups.
- Ensure you’ve entered proper timings as this is the base criteria for a ticket to be assigned to a live agent.
- Working hours only affect the logic of ticket assignment in the Inbox. Report metrics such as Average handling time, First response time would not be affected by the working hours as they are dependent on how long a ticket is assigned to an agent.
Example: You have set business hours as 9 AM - 5 PM on Mon - Fri. If a ticket is assigned to an agent on Friday, 4.45 pm, and the ticket was only resolved by the agent at 9.15 am on Monday. Then the handling time for that particular ticket would be 3870 mins and not 30 mins.