Business hours

A business-hours group is a workspace definition of when your operation is open. Multiple groups are supported (one per region or department), and one is flagged as the tenant default.

Creating a group

1. Settings → Business Hours → + New.
2. Name (e.g. UAE office hours, KSA Weekend).
3. Timezone — IANA identifier (Asia/Dubai, Asia/Riyadh, etc). The schedule evaluates against this timezone regardless of the customer’s local time. A picker offers common MENA + global zones; you can also type any IANA name.
4. Use as the tenant default — when checked, this group becomes the fallback whenever an SLA rule, department, or recipe asks for “business hours” without naming a specific group.
5. Weekly schedule — each weekday has an Open / Closed toggle. When Open, add one or more time ranges (start → end) with + Add range. Multiple ranges support split shifts (e.g. 09:00–13:00 and 14:00–18:00).
6. Holidays — date (YYYY-MM-DD) + label. The schedule is treated as fully closed on each listed date.
7. Departments — optional chip multi-select. When set, SLA rules scoped to one of these departments resolve their business-hours clock against this group.

Where groups are used

• Business Hours node in recipes — branches the flow based on whether a named group is currently open.
• SLA rules with the business-hours clock — the rule’s timer pauses outside the group’s open ranges. SLA rules scoped to a department pull the group whose department list contains that department; tenant-scoped rules pull the tenant default.
• Team auto-assignment fallback — chats arriving outside business hours queue rather than auto-assign.
• CSAT timing — surveys are not sent outside business hours by default (configurable per CSAT form).

Best practices

• One group per region you operate in. Mark the most common one as the tenant default.
• For 24/7 operations, leave every weekday Open with 00:00–23:59 — the business-hours check still runs but always reports “open.”
• Test holiday handling at least one cycle before go-live. The most common bug: forgetting to add a year-specific holiday list (Eid dates shift annually).
• Attach departments only when an SLA rule actually needs different open hours per team. If every team shares the same hours, leave the field empty and rely on the tenant default.

Timezones

CraftBot uses IANA timezone identifiers (e.g. Asia/Dubai, Asia/Riyadh). Daylight savings is handled automatically for timezones that observe it.

Editing a live group

Edits take effect immediately for new business-hours evaluations. In-flight Business Hours node executions that already evaluated against the old schedule are unaffected.

Deleting a group

Deleting a group that is currently the tenant default will leave SLA rules without a fallback clock — you’ll see a warning in the delete confirmation. Promote another group to default first, or accept that affected rules will fall back to calendar time until a default is re-assigned.