Business Hours: Holiday Repetition

Thanks for the feedback, Sebastian! 

We're interested to hear from other users as well if you have similar needs.

Yes! its ridiculous that holidays do not allow you set the hours, please improve schedules to include this functionality.

For example our office closes at lunch on Friday for Christmas lunch, I am now forced to alter our business hours instead of setting holiday to start from 1pm, which I will need to set a reminder for myself to correct before next Friday.

Come on Zendesk, pretty simple...

It would be very helpfull if we can set specific opening times for some days of the year. Like for example on December 24th, we will close earlier than a normal week day.

+1. Yes we also would like to have this function because sometimes the teams only need to work half due to public holiday

+1 we need this feature as well.

+1 - Count us in. We definitely need this functionality. 

+1 to this as well

Totally agree. We also need holiday business hour function.

+1 on the holiday scheduling by hours/half-day

Are there any updates on this request?

At the moment, we are unable to automate our holiday schedule for regional holidays. 

Example: 

We have 3 'tiers' of support hours: Global (04:00 - 20:00 ET), Advanced (08:00 - 20:00 ET) and Foundation (09:00 - 17:00 ET). Our customers are supported within these hours based on the support tier they have purchased, regardless of their location. 

However, our regional offices are closed for certain holidays that are not observed by other offices. For example, our UK office closes for Good Friday and Easter Monday but the US office does not. Because holidays can only be entered for the full day on a schedule, we can't enter these as holidays and need to manually adjust each of our business hours schedules on the week of the holiday (e.g, when the UK office is closed, we need to set the Global business hours to 09:00 - 20:00 ET) 

I should be able to enter a holiday that accounts for the UK office being closed. I want to be able to say that on Monday 5th April that there is a holiday from 04:00 - 09:00 ET. This would allow me to set up all of our company's holidays for the year in advance, and automate our response emails to inform customers that our offices are closed when they submit tickets. 

Currently, this is a manual task to update the schedules which is extremely impractical. 

+1 on holiday hours and being able to change the schedule in quarter-hour increments. We do weekly, hour-long staff meetings and want our phones to shut off 15 minutes early so that our agents have that time to wrap up the calls and chats they are on before the meeting starts. As it stands, we currently have to have them shut off a half-hour early and that's 15 minutes of answering calls that we're losing out on.

+1 on holiday hours too! We also have different shifts around the world, so blocking out a holiday at the 'day' level isn't granular enough. We'd love to see the ability to set these hourly. At the moment as above we're forced to edit the global business hours for this reason - which then also means we can only hop in and update them less than a week in advance.

Thank you everyone for the feedback, please keep it coming, it's truly valuable to us. I'm pleased to share one improvement that's rolling out in the next week or so and that is the ability to set Schedules in 15 minute increments in admin settings, rather than the previous 30 minute increments. 

While we don't have other enhancements planned for this year, we periodically review feedback like this, and re-assess our priorities quarterly. Thanks again.

+1 to being able to link a Schedule to a Calendar to define holidays.

It would be amazing to have the option to link to a team calendar to identify working ours and Out-of-Office, such as what's available via Google calendar.

+1 

We would like to have the possibility to add a holiday once and then apply it to several of our brand (like a matrix). Currently we need to add the same holiday (e.g. Christmas or Easter Monday) to each brand separately.

+1 - Count us in. We definitely need this functionality, especially the possibility to add a holiday once and then apply it to several of our brand (like a matrix). Currently we need to add the same holiday (e.g. Christmas or Easter Monday) to each brand separately.

We have to manage 9 different CEE countries and such a function would be really useful!

Is there any update on this request?

We have mid-day holidays, and it would be really great to be able to differentiate fixed date for a holiday like 25 December that could set up only once from variable date like Easter Friday that changes every year. 

It would really be a major improvement.

Thank you everyone for continuing to share your needs for this. Unfortunately, this is not on our roadmap for this year, so I will leave the status as Not Planned for now. It's possible we'll prioritize this in the future, as it's really all down to customer demand.

This year we've prioritized investments in other areas, such as SLAs. Next month we're launching Group SLAs at Relate, and then later the ability to apply SLAs to more interactions, with new SLA target types, and the ability to customize existing ones.

Thanks again for your continued feedback, it's really appreciated.

Is there any update as to when or if something like this is coming? If not, are there any plugins that could achieve the same thing?

Pivoting the team during a company event or outage is very rudimentary, and means we have to staff an admin or promote someone's access level to else to ensure that we're able to turn off our inbound messages every time we have a company-wide meeting

For clarity of use case - We have at least one hour-long company meeting a month. Having to go in and change the whole schedule like that feels somewhat dated. I don't see a clear reason why there isn't a "set-it-and-forget-it" version of dropping in dates that aren't an entire day.

Thank you everyone for continuing to upvote this. This is not on our roadmap for this year, so I left the status as Not Planned, for now. I've also updated the title of this request to focus on holiday repetition. We have another request for supporting holidays in hours here so please comment and upvote that if you're looking for that as well.

We are going to leave this post open for comment to allow others to provide their feedback and use cases, however please note as is stated in our Community Guidelines that we can not commit to prioritizing any one piece of feedback we receive in the community.

This year we have a lot of exciting investments in product capabilities planned. Join us next month at Relate to find out more. You can attend in person or stream the product keynote online.

Thank you again for your continued feedback, it's really appreciated.

Adding to the list here, we're working on a change to our support model to include more coverage during the week, but also exclude regional holidays, not having this will be a _HUGE_ operational burden to the admins as we're:

* Unable to proactively fill in regional holidays

* Have to determine the time period(s) for each holiday and manually remove/re-add them to the schedule.

This kind of operation is not only time consuming, but adds a decent possibility of making mistakes which would directly affect customers.

Need this function! Please!

+1 We have a reminder ticket that reopens every year to remind us to find the holidays to add them to the schedule. We have many holidays and have to make the update to each. This is a need to save us time and reduce error of forgetting or putting the wrong date

+1 for all our Zendesk clients as a reseller. It is sad that something so “given” as recurring holidays have not been implemented by Zendesk even 6 years and is not on a roadmap after the first comment was made here. There was a newer thread https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/7508850886170-Recurring-Holidays-in-Schedules as well, but it was closed down for comments and routed to here.