Consider Business hours in a Service/Ticket Workflow

[SGRO7]

Hello dear Community! 

I was wondering if anybody did by chance find out to operate workflows that consider the business hours of a company somehow? 

I know that there is no such property or option by default. 

However, there is the option to set times in which the workflow is active. I have also found a workaround in the forum where someone recommends creating one workflow which is active during business hours and one that is active outside of business hours. 

The problem being that in our case, this is about Tickets being raised by our customers. We guarantee a certain response time based on 4 different SLA levels. Therefore, outside of the ticket creation workflow itself, we also have one to remind the responsible employee as well as to escalate it if the mentioned time is almost reached. 

This workflow is basically that the "Wait until function" is in the first step set to trigger after half that time has passed. Then it checks if the Ticket is still in the stage "New" of the Pipeline. If this is the case it sends a reminder to the responsible employee. The workflow then goes on until half an hour before the time is completely passed and checks again if the Ticket is still in the "New" Ticket stage. If that is the case it sends an escalation mail to the management team. 

The problem is that with our Bronze Level the time within we guarantee a response is 16 Hours. So if I set the time the Workflow is active between let's say 9:00 until 17:00, that would be messed up due to the overall delay being more than these hours between the workflow should be active, correct? 

Hope that my whole explanation is understandable! 🙂 
Thank you so much in advance! 

Have a nice day and best regards, 

Sebastian 

[JessicaH]

Hi @SGRO7,

Thanks for reaching out.

I want to tag in some thought leaders to see if they can assist with this.

Hi @Kim_HM @mike-ward @Tnichs, would you be able to share your thoughts with @SGRO7?

Thanks!

Jess   

[Nynke_HM]

Hi @SGRO7 ,

If I understand it correctly, your ticketing system is available for customers which are devided in service levels that come with a certain amount of response time. 

To make sure every employee and every customer get what they need, I'd do the following:

• Make sure the SLA level/response time is added as property to every customer record.
• Create the internal reminder workflows for your employees per SLA level, based on the create date + time of the ticket. Delete the time frame setting from those workflows (as in: between or outside business hours).
• Create separate external workflows to take care of the auto-repond communication with your customer after ticket creation. One for during and one for outside business hours so the customer knows what to expect. You could use personalization tokens in the email to make sure the customer knows in what time frame it should expect a reply.

If the time available to solve the ticket is dependent on the fact if the ticket was added during or outside business hours, you could delete the setting or create separate workflows per SLA level as well. 

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,

Nynke

(Thanks for the tag @JessicaH, Kim forwarded it to me)

[SGRO7]

Hi @Nynke_HM , 

thank you so much for your great answer! 🙂 

you more or less got everything that we want to do there. We also have everything more or less established as you mentioned. With custom properties on company levels that get copied on contact level (SLA Level, Response Time, etc.) and all of these properties also get copied into the ticket. All tickets then come in a pipeline through a workflow. So that side works very well.  (We also have the auto-response to the client here)  

Additionally, we have for each level of SLA a very own workflow just for the internal reminder mails (and management escalation). 

I have also worked with my account manager on this issue and we came up with the following: 

-) For the workflows we set the execution time on our business hours (e.g. 9:00-17:00). With these settings, all the delays in the workflow would trigger/run through even though they would be outside of this time window. 

-) As such we created an action in front of each delay, that would only trigger within the "business hours". That way, we can ensure that e.g. the client doesn't open a ticket on Saturday, but the delay still runs through, only to send the reminder and escalation mail on Monday at 9:00 instead of the supposed 9:00 plus the delay time until the reminder mail. Hope that is somewhat clear! 

I will add some screenshots here to give you an idea of how it is created now. (Quick disclaimer: unfortunately, our portal is in German, but I think you will get the idea nevertheless). 

I think this more or less solves our problem. 

With the addition of the time-frame when the workflow should trigger, the internal mails are only sent within our business hours. In order for the delays to properly trigger only in the business hours as well, we added the action before. 

In that case, if a client opens a ticket on Saturday or Sunday, everything should work as intended. The same is true for outside the business hours during the week. 

The only loophole is if a client opens a ticket let's say on Tuesday at 15:00. The mail would trigger and the delay afterward as well. The delay would run even though business hours would eventually be over and continue. Making it that the reminder would technically still send Wednesday at 9:00. (before the time is technically officially over)

Nevertheless, this is way better than what we had in place before. 

I hope everything makes sense to you! 

Unfortunately, there is barely any better way to describe our system as well as the solution. However, I think we are way closer to an ideal setup than before!! 

Thank you to everybody and have a pleasant weekend, 

Best regards, 

Sebastian 

[AMcFarlane]

I have been searching for something like this as a relatively new convert to Service Hub. The key for us would be that the SLA timers etc were shown in reporting. So, for example, the first response time metric took account of our business hours. Not sure if that is something you look at too and have found a solution for?

[rachelganon]

Yes! I'm actually quite surprised this isn't a feature as it is. This is critical for us