Making a trigger respond to business hours

A trigger can behave differently inside and outside opening hours, which is how an out-of-hours reply gets sent only out of hours.

A trigger can behave differently inside and outside opening hours, which is how an out-of-hours reply gets sent only out of hours.

Set up the rule

1. Define your business hours first. Without a schedule there is nothing to compare against.
2. Create a trigger.
3. Add a condition on whether the ticket arrived within business hours.
4. Add your action, such as an automatic reply setting expectations.
5. Save and test at a time that should match.

The obvious use

An acknowledgement that tells the truth. Inside hours: we will look at this shortly. Outside: we are closed and will pick it up in the morning.

Customers are considerably more patient when they know, and considerably less so when a confirmation implies someone is reading at eleven at night.

Less obvious uses

• Routing differently out of hours, to an on-call group rather than the day team.
• Suppressing internal notifications so agents are not pinged overnight.
• Setting priority differently, where something arriving at the weekend genuinely means something else.

Holidays count

Holidays defined on the schedule are outside business hours, so a rule built on this behaves correctly on public holidays without any extra work. That only holds if somebody keeps the holiday list current, which is a January job worth putting in a calendar.

Time zones

The schedule has a time zone, and it should be the one your team works in rather than where your account was created. Getting this wrong shifts every out-of-hours rule by an hour or more, and it is invisible until a customer mentions it.

See also

• Setting your business hours
• Managing holidays
• Using multiple schedules