It doesn’t make sense for your help desk to take weekends into account in your SLA policies. Otherwise, Monday morning SLA reports will be quite threatening to your helpdesk. For this, Freshservice offers two different ways in which you can calculate your SLAs - calendar hours which includes your working hours as well as holidays, Business hours which denotes only your official working hours.

 

Understanding Business Hours:

 

Business Hours refer to the working hours of your company. When chosen, anything outside your working hours, including calls will not be timed by Freshservice. Business hours are preferable in most use cases with low and medium priority. You can specify the timings with respect to your company Business Hours in the Admin tab. You can also set business hours for every day of the week separately.  

 

Understanding Calendar Hours:

 

Calendar hours are regular full-day hours and they cover everything round the clock. If you are promising your requesters 24x7 support, you should be clocking in Calendar hours instead of Business Hours in your SLA Policy. Usually, they are suited for high priority and urgent priority tickets, which require immediate attention from your team, even if it's a weekend or a holiday.

 

For example, if a ticket is due in six hours on a friday evening and if the SLA is in business hours, then you are good to resolve it on Monday whereas if it is in calendar hours, then its better to resolve it immediately for a neat SLA report.

 

Quick guide to defining business hours in Freshservice:

  • Login to your account as an administrator.

  • Go to Admin > Service management > Service Desk settings > Business hours 
    If your account has more than one workspace: 

    To modify global workflows, navigate to Admin > Global Settings >  Service management > Service Desk settings > Business hours

    To modify workspace-level workflows, navigate to Admin > Workspace Settings > {Workspace Name} >  Service management > Service Desk settings > Business hours

    Important Notes:
    1. Workspace admins can create Business hours at a workspace level. 
2. Global business hours apply to tickets across all workspaces 
3. Default Business hours are created and enabled by default at the global level.

Order of Execution: The business hours for the ticket are determined by the local business hours configured for a specific workspace. If the specified conditions do not match, then it follows the global business hours. If both do not apply, then the default business hours become applicable to the ticket.  

  • Next to Default Business Hours, click on the Edit button.

  • You can choose the Timezone in Service Desk Rebranding and it will be reflected here.

  • If your service desk offers round the clock support, set the service desk hours to 24 hrs x 7 days.

  • You can define working hours based on your organization’s needs. In case you work on different timings everyday, you could define them separately using the Select working days/hours option. You can uncheck non-working days from your business calendar.


  • You can define the Yearly Holiday List either manually or by importing a country's holiday list. The holidays will be ignored when calculating SLAs for a ticket.



  • Click on the Save button to update your default business Hours.

In addition to this, you could also set up multiple business hours for different groups in Freshservice and control the way SLAs work for them individually. They can be used to manage teams working on different shifts or regions. To know more about multiple business hours click here.