The hours support promises to be there — and how they change every timer and metric you run.
Business hours. Business hours in customer support are the published hours during which a team commits to responding — for example, Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 18:00 in a stated timezone. Business hours determine when SLA timers run, how response-time metrics are calculated, and what auto-replies promise outside those hours.
A business-hours schedule has three parts: the weekly hours, an anchoring timezone, and a holiday calendar. Once declared, it becomes the clock the rest of the system runs on. SLA timers pause when the hours end and resume when they begin, so a four-hour first-response target set at 17:00 on Friday comes due Monday morning, not in the small hours of Saturday. Response-time metrics can be computed on the same clock, which is the difference between measuring your team and measuring the rotation of the earth.
The non-obvious detail is the timezone anchor. “9 to 6” means nothing until you say where — and a team with customers across regions has to choose between one honest window, split schedules per team, or follow-the-sun coverage. Any of these can work; what fails is leaving it implicit.
Without declared hours, your metrics lie about your team. A message arriving Friday at 18:05 and answered promptly Monday at 9:10 records a 63-hour response on a calendar clock — a terrible number nobody caused. Averages absorb enough of these and the team looks slow while working perfectly to plan.
Hours are also an honesty device for customers. A published window plus an auto-reply that states it — “we’re back Monday at 9:00 CET” — converts an open-ended silence into a known wait. Customers forgive closed; they don’t forgive unknowable.
Declare hours you actually keep, in a named timezone, with the holiday calendar loaded — then point your SLA policy and reporting at that schedule, the way SLA and business hours pair in inrelay. Resist the temptation to publish wider hours than you staff; a broken 8-to-22 promise costs more trust than an honest 9-to-18.
One measurement worth running quarterly: what share of inbound messages arrive outside your hours, and from which timezones. A rising out-of-hours share is your data for the real decision — extend coverage, add a second shift, or invest in self-service that answers at 3 a.m. so nobody has to.
Give your customers faster answers and your team their evenings back.
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