What is the difference between Support business hours and Chat operating hours?

Question

What is the difference between the business hours I can schedule in Support and the operating hours I can set up in the Chat dashboard? Which schedule is referenced when I use live-chat, live-chat in Agent Workspaces, or bot builder in messaging?

Answer

Business hours within Support and the operating hours within Chat are distinct sets of schedules that do not interact with one another. See more details on the differences below.

Support business hours

Support business hours apply to tickets, messaging, views, SLA policies, and business rules. Support business hours can be referenced as a conditional step for messaging in your bot builder.

Business hours are available in Admin Center, by navigating to the Schedules page.

When you set a schedule, the schedule is used for all tickets in your account. All business hours metrics and rules will use your default schedule.

The hours you set are relative to the time zone set for your Zendesk account. For accounts with multiple schedules (Enterprise), you can set different time zones for each schedule.

You can create views, SLA policies, triggers, and automations based on your business hours.

For messaging, the business hours condition references your schedule in Support. You can add a business hours condition in flow bot builder as a flow step.

For more information on business hours, see the article: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays.

Chat operating hours

Note: Any schedules you create in Support will not transfer over or apply to Chat operating hours.

Chat operating hours apply to live-chat sessions and live-chat in Agent Workspaces, made from the Web Widget (Classic). Operating hours are configured in the Chat dashboard for determining agent and Chat availability.

Operating hours are found in your dedicated Chat dashboard by navigating to Settings > Account > Operating hours tab.

You can apply one offline hours schedule for the entire account. If you have multiple departments enabled, you can apply custom schedules to each department.

When you enable operating hours, any agents signed in to Chat outside of the scheduled hours have their availability status set to Invisible. Agents cannot manually change their availability status during offline hours.

If the offline form is enabled, you can also display your operating hours on your widget.

Chat operating hours do not allow you to set holidays, unlike Support schedules.

For more information see the following articles:

For chat, see: Creating a schedule with operating hours.

For business hours in Support, see: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays.