Business Hours

The Business Hours section of the agent editor decides when your agent is available. Inside the hours you set, the agent answers as usual. Outside them, inbound calls follow a fallback you choose, and outbound calls are declined.

Use it for inbound lines that should only be answered while your team is around. Open the agent editor and select Business Hours in the Global Settings panel.

Turn business hours on

Enable Limit agent to business hours. While the toggle is off, the agent takes calls at any time on any day.

Once it is on, the panel shows the agent’s current local time and whether that moment falls inside your hours. That readout is the quickest way to confirm a schedule behaves the way you expect before you publish the agent.

Hours are always evaluated in the agent’s own timezone, never the caller’s and never your browser’s. An agent set to Europe/Berlin with hours of 09:00 to 18:00 is open from 09:00 in Berlin, whichever country the call comes from. If a schedule looks shifted by a few hours, check the timezone first.

Set your weekly hours

Every day of the week has its own toggle under Weekly hours. Turn on the days you are open and set a start and end time for each one. Days you leave off show Closed, and the agent never takes calls on them.

Select + on a day to add a second window to it. Two windows on the same day cover a break, for example 09:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 17:00 for a closed lunch hour. Times use a 24-hour clock, the start has to be earlier than the end, so a window cannot run past midnight into the next day.

Decide what happens outside hours

Inbound calls outside business hours sets the fallback for callers who reach you when you are closed. All three apply to inbound calls only:

Only Decline shows up as an unanswered call. Transfer and Custom action both finish as completed calls, so they sit in your call history and analytics alongside ordinary conversations rather than standing out as blocked.

For Transfer, pick one of your existing call transfers in the Transfer action dropdown. The handoff happens immediately, with no agent conversation first, and if the transfer cannot be completed the call ends rather than falling back to the agent. An out-of-hours transfer is worth testing end to end, since a destination that is also closed leaves the caller with nothing.

How business hours affect outbound calls

Outbound has no caller to hand off to, so there are no options to choose. A call placed while the agent is closed is declined, and the end call reason on the record points at business hours, which is how you tell these apart from calls that failed for another cause.

Campaigns add a second gate rather than replacing this one. A campaign can carry its own calling window, which decides whether a recipient is dialed now or waits for the window to open, but the call still has to clear the agent’s business hours when it goes out. A recipient dialed while the agent is closed fails immediately instead of waiting.

The simplest split is one gate per direction: business hours on the agents that take inbound calls, and a campaign’s calling window for anything outbound. Each direction then has a single schedule to reason about.

FAQ