Business Hours and Assignment Logic
What this domain covers
Business Hours and Assignment Logic tests how calendars, holidays, time zones, and assignment methods interact. This is where many timed configurations fail silently because the calendar is wrong rather than the rule.
Core rules and concepts
- A business-hours set defines time zone, working days, daily start and end times, and holidays. Plans may allow multiple sets for different regions or groups.
- Business hours feed SLA policies, Supervisor time conditions, and time-based reports. If a rule or policy references business hours, elapsed time is counted only inside the calendar.
- Assignment methods include manual assignment, round robin, load balanced, skill-based, and IntelliAssign where available. Group-level automatic assignment must be enabled for non-manual methods.
- Routing order is typically Dispatch’r to group, then group auto-assignment to agent. Manual assignment or a later rule can override the automatic result.
- Agent availability and load influence some assignment methods. An agent who is offline or at capacity may be skipped even if technically eligible.
- Holidays must be added explicitly; a weekday is not automatically a working day just because the calendar is Monday through Friday.
Worked example
An 8-business-hour resolution SLA uses a Monday-to-Friday, 09:00–18:00 calendar. A ticket arrives Friday at 17:00. Friday contributes one hour, leaving seven hours. The SLA resumes Monday at 09:00 and expires Monday at 16:00, not Saturday at 01:00. The reasoning: the calendar pauses outside working hours, so you count only in-calendar time. If the account time zone were set to a different region, the same ticket would produce a different due time.
Traps that cost marks
- Setting business hours in one time zone and testing with an agent in another.
- Forgetting holidays, so SLA due times fall on closed days.
- Assuming daylight-saving transitions do not affect calendar math.
- Enabling automatic assignment without enough eligible agents.
- Confusing calendar-hour SLA with business-hour SLA.