Business hours setup and its effect

Business hours are the hours of the day in which business is generally conducted. These are especially applicable for the customer support team to track the operating hours of the customer support. For your Salesforce organization, you can configure multiple business hours. Business hour settings apply to case-related information about escalation rules and case milestones in the entitlement processes.

Once the business hours are set, they can be used to set the time at which a support team will be available to work on the case. Business hours can also be specified when making the escalation rules. Setting the business hours on the escalation rules, results in the case getting automatically updated and escalated when the escalation rules are within the time and location of the rule.

Let's assume that your organization's working hours are from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and a case is raised at 4:00 p.m. The escalation time for this case is 2 hours if the case is not resolved. So if the business hours are not set up for your organization, then the case will be escalated at 6:00 p.m. By default, business hours are set to 24 hours, seven days a week in the default time zone specified in your organization's profile.

Setting up the business hours and its effects

To set up the business hours for your organization, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Company Profile | Business Hours.
2. Click on the New Business Hour button.
   
3. Enter data in the Business Hours Name field and select the Active checkbox to activate it. Optionally, select Use these business hours as the default to set the business hours as the default business hours on all new cases.
4. Select Time Zone and define the working hours from Sunday to Saturday (by default, the 24 hours checkbox is selected next to each day, so deselect it and enter the business hours). You can leave the Business Hours field blank.

Note

Salesforce automatically calculates daylight saving time for the time zones available for the business hours. It helps you to calculate the correct case age.