Setting your business hours

A schedule tells Zendesk when you are open. Everything about timing depends on it, so it comes before SLAs and reminders.

A schedule tells Zendesk when you are open. Everything about timing depends on it, so it comes before SLAs and reminders.

Create a schedule

1. Open Admin Center, then Objects and rules, then Business rules, then Schedules.
2. Add a schedule and name it.
3. Set the time zone. See below.
4. Set the hours for each day.
5. Add your holidays.
6. Save.

The time zone is the one to get right

It should be where your team works, not where your account happened to be created or where your head office is. Everything measured in business hours shifts if this is wrong, and nothing warns you.

The symptom is subtle: SLAs that breach an hour earlier than expected, and out-of-hours replies going out at the wrong time. Worth checking even on an account that has been running for years.

Past figures are not recalculated

The reason to get this right early rather than eventually. Business-hours metrics capture the schedule as it stood at the time of each event, and earlier events are not recalculated when you change it.

So adding a missing holiday today fixes the figures from today. Everything already recorded keeps the old schedule baked in, and no amount of correcting the schedule reaches back.

Do it before the SLAs

An SLA measured in business hours needs a schedule to measure against. Adding the schedule later means your historical figures were calculated differently from your current ones, and comparisons across that date mean nothing.

Be honest about the hours

The schedule should say when you answer, not when the office is open. A team that stops taking new work at half past four should not have a schedule saying five, because every promise built on it will be half an hour optimistic.

One schedule, unless you are on Enterprise

Growth and Professional allow a single schedule for the whole account. Enterprise and Enterprise Plus allow several, with the first in the list acting as the default and triggers deciding which ticket gets which.

Deleting that first one does not leave you without a default: the next schedule in the list takes over and applies to every ticket that no trigger claims. So a tidy-up can move the whole account onto different opening hours without anybody changing an SLA. Check what is second before you delete what is first.

On Enterprise you can also give a schedule its own time zone. Below that, every schedule follows the account time zone, so a second office cannot have its own opening hours below that.

See also

• Managing holidays
• Using multiple schedules
• What an SLA is and how Zendesk measures it
• Reporting within business hours