Business Hours / Shifts

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Set or disable your business hours

Business hours are disabled by default. When business hours are disabled, analytics will run on a 24-hour clock.

If your team covers both EST and PST time zones from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM respectively, but you are based in PST set business hours from 6:00 AM - 5:00 PM to cover all working times.

Scenario: Your business hours are set for 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM and a message arrives at 4:30 PM. Your team replies the next day at 9:30 AM. Response time will count as 1 hour. 

Your business hours are set for 9:00AM - 5:00PM and a message arrives at 6:00 PM. Your team replies the next day at 9:30 AM. Response time will count as 30 minutes.

• Time zones: Business hours should be defined to your current time zone. If you have teams in multiple time zones, set business hours to include other locations to ensure their data is captured

• Responding outside of business hours: When business hours are set, hours that fall outside of them will not count towards response and handle times, giving you a clearer picture of how your teammates are performing. Keep in mind that if you deactivate Saturday and Sunday, but respond on Sunday to a message received on Saturday, the response time for that conversation will be 0 (because 0 business hours passed between its receipt and handling).

• No retroactivity: For performance reasons, business hours are applied every time you receive or send a message. This means that if you edit your business hours, it won't change the response time of past messages. It will only affect future conversations.

• Setting Shifts to support teams that work across multiple timezones: Teammate analytics will calculate activities based on their defined shifts, even if it's outside of the team's business hours. Teammates who do not have a shift defined will fallback to having their analytics activities calculate based on the team's business hours. Read more about Front's Shifts feature here.

• See how many messages arrived inside vs. outside of business hours: Use an Analytics export (messages export) and filter by the message date/time within the export to see how many came in during a certain time.