When you have parts of your support team working across different regions, times or time zones, managing the working hours of each group becomes a hassle. Since each center wakes up at a different time, it makes sense to align their SLA timers with their business hours.


Multiple business hours in Freshdesk allows you to create different sets of working hours and holidays, which can then be assigned to specific groups. 


How does having multiple business hours help?

When your whole team operates out of the same office and they clock in and clock out at the same time everyday, just having one set of official business hours sounds fine. But when your team works out of multiple centers, or follows different work hours, it is easier for you to lay down a separate set of business hours for each team. By dedicating separate business hours, SLAs can be executed properly based on time or place of origin and your team won't be incorrectly penalized.


When would setting up another set of business hours be necessary?

  • Centers at NYC and LON: If you have a geographically distributed team working across multiple time zones, setting up different business hours for each center makes sense.
  • Different teams to manage different climes: If you've split your Global Support Teams by the regions from which customers raise support issues, you might want each set of agents to work on the same hours as the customers they help.
  • Day Workers and Night Owls: If you have special teams that rotate your 24x7 support center by jumping in at different shifts, you might want to set definite working hours for each group.


How to create multiple Business Hours

  • Login to your support portal
  • Go to Admin > Team > Business Hours
  • Click New business hours
  • You can create new business hours based on either location or a specific team
  • Be sure to specify the appropriate Time Zone setting for your Business Hour

      

  • You can also import holidays according to whichever country your team is working from
     


Once you've created the business hours that you want, here's how to assign them to groups:


  • Login to your support portal
  • Go to Admin > Team > Groups
  • Select the appropriate group based on location and team
  • Under the list of Business Hours, select the corresponding one
  • Click Save and your all incoming tickets assigned to that group will have SLAs executed based on the Business Hours that you just defined


Here, the Billing team has been assigned Sydney's business hours.