Setting Your Team's Business Hours

Overview

By adding your working hours to Kayako, you can make sure your SLAs and automations are only active when your team is active. Once you have defined your business hours, you can specify them when building SLAs. That way, only your on-the-clock hours will count against your reply and resolution deadlines. You can also use them when defining your automations to prevent notification emails, surveys, or other automated actions from occurring when your team is offline.

You can create as many sets of business hours as you need. You can also add any holidays on which your team will not be available during their regular hours. That way, you do not have to worry about your team's response metrics taking a hit, when you are out of the office.

When you set your SLA to follow "business hours," and if you have multiple business hours configured in your instance, that SLA will then follow the business hour of the team to which the conversation it is assigned to. 

 

Prerequisite

• To edit business hours in Kayako, you will need an administrator account with the 'Manage SLAs and business hours' permission.

 

Solution

Kayako comes with a default set of business hours predefined for Monday-Friday, from 9 AM - 5 PM, local time. But let us say you are splitting up your support team into technical support and customer service. Your technical support will be working those standard business hours, but your customer service team will be available for extended hours, six days a week. Let us walk through how to add a new set of business hours for them, so Kayako will know which hours they are active.

To set your team's business hours, follow the steps given below:

1. Sign in to Kayako and go to the Admin area.
2. Under the 'TEAM SETTINGS' heading, click the Business hours link.
3. Here, you will see the default business hours and any custom hours that have been added already. Click the New business hours button to add new extended hours for the customer service team.
4. In the Business hours title field, add a descriptive title. In our example, we can use the Customer Service Team.
5. Below the 'Business Hours' heading, you will see a weekly timetable. Click and drag across the cells for the days and hours your team will be working. Let us say the customer service team will have coverage from 8:00-20:00 on Monday-Friday, and 9:00-16:00 on Saturdays. Your table should look like this:

   

6. Scroll down to the 'Holidays' heading, where you can add any holidays that affect your team's availability.
7. Let us say your customer service team has a half-day on New Year's Eve and the day off on New Year's Day. Click the Add a holiday button.
8. In the Holiday title field, enter New Year's Eve.
9. Click the date dropdown, and select December 31st.
10. In the table next to it, highlight the cells for '9:00' through '13:00'.

    

11. Click the Save holiday button.
12. Click the Add a holiday button again and repeat the steps above for New Year's Day, but leave the timetable empty.
13. Click the Save holiday button.
14. Repeat the steps above for any other holidays.
15. When you are done, click the Save button to add your new set of business hours.

 

 

Confirmation

Now, when you create teams in Kayako for your technical support and customer service teams, you can select the appropriate set of business hours. Plus, you can customize your SLAs and automations to adjust to each team's active hours. 

Keep in mind that specific business hours you established can only be applied to teams, it cannot be applied directly to an SLA. As mentioned above, when you set your SLA to follow "business hours," that SLA will then follow the business hour of the team to which the conversation it is assigned to.