Ticket Schedules in Zendesk

What is a Ticket Schedule?

Schedules are used in reporting, triggers, views and SLA policies. They allow you to build workflow and allow you to analyse errors in customer service operation. A schedule is a combination of a time zone+normal business hours+holidays.

Importance of Schedules:

Schedules set business hours for customer service operations. Let's see two examples in which schedules can impact customer experience and team reporting.

Let's suppose you have set your business hours from 9AM to 5PM. If the customer replies at 5:07PM, you can have an automated notification(using triggers) telling them that you will reply first thing tomorrow. This simple step sets the appropriate expectation and your customers will be happy with the outcome.

Schedules also play an important role when it comes to reporting. Let's say a ticket arrived at 4:55PM on Friday i.e. before your hour ends. Then on Monday, the agents logs in and resolves the ticket at 8:05AM. From the moment ticket was created till it was solved, more than 60 hours have passed, but within your business hours, the ticket was solved in less than 10 minutes.

Those were a couple of reasons why you must use schedules within Zendesk support.

How to manage schedules?

Setting up a Schedule and Holidays:

In order to navigate and setup your schedules, go to your 'Admin' icon. Scroll down to 'Settings'; and under settings you have 'Schedules'.

Now click on 'Add schedule'. Then, give your schedule a name, match the 'Time Zone' to yours, select 'Create'.

Once that is selected, you can now go down and select your working hours. It must be already selected 9:00AM-5:00PM on all week days. Then just set your business hours for each day by changing the position of the blue boxes, add your breaks, add your holidays according to your company schedule.

Save the page.

Navigate to 'Holidays' tab, you can start adding your holidays by clicking on 'Add Holidays'. Enter name, start date and end date, then click on save.

Delete a Schedule and Holiday:

To delete a schedule or holiday, just visit the 3 little dots on the corner and delete it.

Note:

If you are on an Enterprise plan then you can have multiple schedules but for trial plan or professional plan you can just have a single schedule.

Hope you find this article helpful. Happy Reading!