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Business hours define the working hours of an organization. As a call center company, you may have different teams attending to customers from different time zones. With Freshcaller, you can create time zone-specific business hours for each phone number in your account and associate them with a call queue or other call workflows (IVR, Agent Extension, Voicebot, etc). 


For example, if your business hours are from Monday to Friday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, you can customize your number properties such that the calls are received only during business hours. You can also decide what should happen if a call is received outside business hours. This way, you will never miss any calls.


User requirements: Only admins and account admins can configure business hours.


This article provides the following details:

  1. Adding business hours
  2. Splitting Business Hours
  3. Adding holiday
  4. Assigning business hours to numbers

Adding business hours

  1. Log in to your Freshcaller account.

  2. Go to Admin Settings > Business Hours. By default, each user account has a 24x7 business hours.

  3. Click on Add Business Hours.

  4. Name: Enter the business hour name.

  5. Timezone: Select a timezone based on the region from where you receive the calls. 

  6. Business Hours: Hover over the business hours and click on the edit icon. By default, the standard business hours is set as Monday - Friday, 08:00 hours to 17:00 hours.
    You can choose to change the time and days of the week. For example, if your working hours are from Monday - Thursday only, then deselect Friday and then click on the tick mark.

  7. Add Business Hours: Create additional business hours based on your company's working hours. For example, if your working days are Monday to Friday, 08:00-17:00 hours, and on Saturday from 09:00 - 13:00 hours, you can easily customize your timings using this option.

  8. Time Slot: Use this option to split your business hours. For more details, see Splitting Business Hours.

  9. Add Holidays: Use this option to add holidays. For more details, see Adding holiday.

  10. Click Add Business Hours. You can now assign the business hour to a number in your account. For details, see Assigning business hours to numbers

Splitting Business Hours

With business hours configuration, you can split your standard working hours and add time slots for usual breaks at work. For example, you can add lunch timings or short tea breaks within the configured business hours. Once added, agents will not receive calls during this time.

  1. Go to Admin Settings > Business Hours. Here, you can see the list of configured business hours in your account. 
    If you want to create new business hours, follow the steps in the section above.
  2. Hover over the business hours and click on the edit icon. Click on Add time slot.
    You can split the business hours by adding the start time and end time for each slot within a single day. For example, if your working hours for Monday to Friday are from 8:00 hrs to 17:00 hrs, with a lunch break for an hour at 12:00 hrs and a tea break from 4:00 to 4:30 hrs, you can split your business for all days as follows:
  3. Once you make the changes, click on the tick mark.

Adding holiday

With this feature, you can declare add and declare holidays within your business hour settings. You can additionally configure the business hours to handle calls received during the declared holidays.


For example, you can redirect calls coming on holidays to an overseas team or choose to leave a voice message and your agents can follow up once regular business hours resume. For more details, see Adding Holiday Calendar.


Note: The Holiday hour configuration and routing is available only from Estate+ plan.

Assigning business hours to numbers

Once you configure business hours, you can associate them to a number and decide how you want to route the inbound calls during and outside the working hours, or during holidays.

  1. Go to Admin Settings > Numbers. You can see the list of numbers in your account.
  2. Hover over the number for which you want to configure business hours and click on the Edit icon.
  3. You will see the number properties and call the actions tab. Switch to the Call Actions tab.
  4. Business Hours:  Select the business hours you want to assign to this number. If you do not have any business hours configured, create a new business hour. You can also select the default 24x7 business hour.
  5. Action (during business hours): Select the action to take when you receive calls during business hours. See step 8 for the list of actions.
  6. Action (outside business hours): Select the action to take if you receive calls outside the working hours. See step 8 for the list of actions.
  7. Action (during holidays): Select the action to take if you receive calls during holidays. See step 8 for the list of actions
  8. For steps 5, 6, and 7, you can select the following actions:
    • Send to call queue: Select this option to route the call to a call queue. You can select a queue from the list of available in your account or create a new call queue.
    • Send to IVR Menu:  Select this option to route the call to an IVR menu. You can select an IVR name from the list available in your account or create a new IVR menu.
    • Send to Voicemail: Select this option to play a prerecorded voice message to your customers. You can select from the list of messages available in your account or create a new message.

    • Send to Agent Extension:  Select this option to route the call to an agent extension call flow. You can select a flow from the list available in your account or create a new agent extension flow.

    • Send to Routing Automation: Select this option to route the call to a routing automation call flow. You can select a flow from the list available in your account or create a new routing automation call flow.

    • Send to Smart Answer Bot:  Select this option to route the call to a voicebot. You can select a voicebot from the list available in your account or create a new voicebot flow.

    • Send to Speech-enabled IVR:  Select this option to route the call to a speech-enabled IVR flow. You can select a flow from the list available in your account or create a new speech-enabled IVR flow.

    • Hangup: If you do not want to take any action, you can choose to hangup the call with a hangup message. This can be used for configuring calls outside your business hours or during holidays.

  9. Click Save changes.

Notes: The availabilty of options/actions that you can to take during and outside business hours and during holidays, depend on your subsription paln:
  • send to call queue: Blossom +
  • send to voicemail: Blossom+
  • send to IVR: Garden+
  • send to agent extension: Garden+
  • send to routing automatio: Estate+
  • send to smart answer bot: Forest
  • send to speech-enabled IVR: Forest