When you have parts of your support team working across different regions, times or time-zones, managing the working hours of each group becomes a hassle. Each center wakes up at a different time, so it makes sense to align SLA timers with the center's business hours.


Multiple business hours in Freshservice allows you to create a different set of working hours and holidays. You can then set these business hours to specific groups.


Why do you need another business hour?


When your whole team sits out of one big office, and come in and go out together, just having one set of "official business hours" sounds alright. But when your team works out of multiple centers, or at different timings, it makes sense for you to lay down a separate set of business hours for each team.


When would you set up another set of business hours?

  • Centers at NYC and LON: If you have a geographically distributed team working across multiple time zones, setting up a different business hour for each center makes sense.
  • Different teams to manage different climes: If you've split your Global Support Teams by the regions from which customers raise support issues, you might want each set of agents to work on the same hours as the customers they help.
  • Day Workers and Night Owls: If you have special teams that rotate your 24*7 support center by jumping in at different shifts, you might want to formalize the working hours of each group.


There are two major steps involved in setting up multiple business hours:

  • Create a new set of Business Hours: First, you need to define the new Business Calendar by setting the working hours and holidays for this calendar.

  • Assign the Business Hour to one or more Groups: Next, you will need to jump into each agent group that you want this new business calendar to be applied to, and select the appropriate calendar.


Quick Guide to creating multiple business hours:

  • 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.

  • There will be one default business hour option already. Click on Create New.

  • You can create new business hours based on either location or a specific team.

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

  • You can choose the Timezone from the drop-down menu.

  • 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 every day, 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 new Business Hours configuration.




Once the multiple business hours have been set, you now have to assign them to tickets and/or the groups.


A quick guide to assigning specific business hours to different tickets:


When you have a support team that helps customers across different time zones it becomes important to define SLA promises based on customer’s departments or other Ticket properties.


Admins can now configure conditions that allow them to define which business hours should be applied to a specific ticket. 

  • In the Create New page, go to When should this business hours be applied section.
  • Click on Add new condition and set conditions on top of Ticket fields that will define when to apply that specific business hours.
  • Admins can set multiple conditions based on different ticket fields and define whether to match all or either of them.


Note: Business Hours can continue to be assigned to each Agent group. However, the system will no longer select the business hour to be applied on a Ticket based on the Agent group assigned to the Ticket. It will be selected based on the first Business Hour whose conditions match the Ticket's properties.



A quick guide to assigning specific business hours to different groups:


  • Click on Admin > User Management > Agent Groups.
    If your account has more than one workspace: 

    To modify global workflows, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > User Management > Agent Groups

    To modify workspace-level workflows, navigate to Admin > Workspace Settings > {Workspace Name} > User Management > Agent Groups

    Here too, you will have groups based on location and teams.
  • Select the group you want to assign the business hours to and click on the Edit option. Here the Capacity Management team has been assigned Chicago business hours.