Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
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
- Define your business hours first, in a schedule under Objects and rules > Business rules > Schedules. Without one there is nothing to compare against.
- Create a trigger.
- Add the condition Ticket > Within business hours?, set to Yes or No. To test a specific schedule rather than whichever one the ticket carries, use the Within condition and name it.
- Add your action, such as an automatic reply setting expectations.
- 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.
Treating a holiday differently
Where you want a holiday to read differently from an ordinary Tuesday evening, there is a separate condition: Ticket > On a holiday?. It is true for the whole calendar day, not only during the hours you would otherwise be open, so a message at ten at night on a public holiday still counts as the holiday rather than as ordinary out-of-hours.
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.
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