Time of Day Rules

1. Time of Day Rules

Auto Response messages can be automatically set to acknowledge the receipt of a contact in a particular queue, at a given time, with a preset response. Examples of this are an acknowledgement of message receipt and often include service level statements. 

Note – the rules by time are determined by the time zone applicable to the site, thus you will have to take the time locally and calculate the offset time to that of where the site resides should they be different.  Example site is configured for Eastern Standard Time but there are agents in both New York and London. Office hours for both branches are 9am to 5 pm.   Any queue for the New York office will have hours of 9am to 5pm whereas for London this will be 5am to 1pm / 4am to noon. The different time spans are because you will need to make changes to these when EST moves in to / out of Daylight Savings (summer) time as this occurs at a different time to that of GMT so accordingly the offset times will alter. 

To do this, click on Time of Day Rules in the Admin Console and select the channel you wish to view  or change; either SMS, Fax, Chat or Email.

To locate the Time of Day Rules page go to Administration à Time of Day Rules

Once selected, the following screen appears:

New time of day rules can be added by clicking on the ‘Add Time of Day Rule’ button at the bottom of the page and then completing details in the resulting screen.  These include:

Click on ‘Save’ to save the rule. Selecting ‘Close’ will return you to the ‘Time of Day Rules’ summary page without saving the changes. 

To delete an auto response time, click on the ‘Delete’ button, then confirm you wish to delete the template or select cancel to retain the template.

Once you have clicked on the ‘Save’ button click on the ‘Times’ tab to allocate the times and days that this rule applies.

1. Time of Day Rules – Setting Times

Once we have set up the base time of day rules, we need to assign the days and times that are to be allocated to activate this rule.

Because of rule priority settings the rule that will be applied will be that of the first match that the software finds that is applicable to the current time.  It is not critical that time of day rule times don’t overlap but we do recommend that when you create office and out of office hours that you cover but don’t overlap every 24 hour period.

1. Time of Day Rules – Selecting Queues

Once we have set up both the Time of Day Rule, the days and times that apply to it, we need also to indicate to the system what channels, and within each channel, what queue the rule is to be allocated to.

Select the appropriate channel from the Channel –Select Channel – list (see below)

When you select a specific channel e.g. SMS – the ‘queue’ box on the right hand side becomes available for you to choose a specific queue

Once selected, click on the ‘Add’ button to include this queue in the Time of Day Rules.  You may quickly add all queues to the channel by selecting the Queue – All.