Teams, hours and reply targets

Enterprise feature (1.19.0, helpdesk). See the Helpdesk overview.

Teams

A team is a queue and the people who answer it: IT, HR, Facilities, Finance. Desk settings → Teams creates, renames and deletes teams (Manage teams), each with a name, a description, an icon and an optional email alias (see Email channel).

Add people to a team in the same place. Each member is an agent or a lead of the team; a person can be in several teams. Membership decides the queues they see in the desk, and the lead role is what makes someone a team lead for reply review and approvals that fall back to “the leads of IT”. A person also needs Work helpdesk tickets and a desk role.

Deleting a team leaves its tickets without a team, for someone with Work every team’s tickets to move; it never deletes tickets. From 1.19.2 it deletes the team’s canned responses, and the confirm dialog says how many.

Each team’s card also has Ask for time when solving (1.19.1): with it on, agents are asked for the time they spent when they solve one of the team’s tickets. See Time tracking.

From 1.19.2 each team’s card also has Status services for IT: the Status page services the team follows, each with when its agents get a pop-up. See Status services for teams.

Calendars

Reply targets count business time: the time a team is open. Each team works to a calendar, set under Desk settings → Calendars (SLA and business hours).

Office hours. A calendar has a name, a time zone and a weekly grid of open hours. It starts as Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30; Copy Monday to weekdays fills the week. Calendars can describe:

• Split shifts: several intervals in a day (09:00 to 12:30 and 13:30 to 17:30).
• 24/7: open all day, every day.
• Shifts past midnight: 22:00 to 06:00. An end of 00:00 means midnight.
• Any time zone: a team in another country keeps its own hours. A new calendar starts in the workspace’s time zone (UTC when the workspace has none).

One calendar is the default: it serves every team without a calendar of its own. On upgrade, the helpdesk’s single schedule becomes the default calendar, Office hours.

Choose a team’s calendar in its settings (or on the Teams page). Changes apply at once.

Holidays

A holiday set is a list of closures, like a country’s bank holidays or an office’s shutdown days. Create sets under Desk settings → Calendars → Holidays, then attach them to calendars. Reply targets stop counting on a holiday, and requesters see why.

• Whole or part days. Close a whole day, or part of one (from 13:00 on Christmas Eve).
• Once or every year. A fixed date (1 January) can repeat every year. Holidays that move (Easter) are added per year.
• Paste a list of dates and names, one per line, or import an .ics file (all-day events; yearly events repeat; links in the file are ignored).
• Copy to next year copies a year’s holidays forward, for the moving ones to be checked.

A holiday closes its own date. For a shift that runs past midnight, a holiday on the 25th closes the morning part of the shift that started on the 24th as well as the shift that starts on the 25th.

Test a due time

Desk settings → Calendars → Test a due time picks a calendar, a start time and a number of business hours, and shows when a target would fall due and which closures it skipped (“Opens Mon 09:00 (Easter Monday closed)”).

Reply targets (SLA)

Desk settings → Reply targets sets, per priority, a first reply target and a resolution target, in business time. The starter set:

Priority	First reply	Resolution
Urgent	1 business hour	1 business day
High	4 business hours	2 business days
Normal	4 business hours	2 business days
Low	4 business hours	2 business days

A business day here is the length of the working day when the starter set was added (8.5 hours for 09:00 to 17:30), stored as minutes: change the targets if your hours differ.

The clock:

• runs in the team’s calendar, skipping closed hours and holidays;
• pauses while a ticket is Waiting on requester or On hold, and resumes when it moves on;
• warns the assignee (or the team’s leads) when a target is nearing, and flags a breach when it passes, with a notice to the same people and the Overdue view;
• stops for the first reply when an agent sends the first public reply, and for resolution when the ticket is solved.

A calendar with no open hours at all never breaches: the queue says No office hours.

Team targets

A team can override the workspace target for any priority: open the team in Desk settings → Teams (or Reply targets) and choose Custom for this team, or leave a priority on the workspace default. Reset goes back to the workspace’s targets.

Moving a ticket to another team keeps the business time it has used and counts the rest against the new team’s target, in the new team’s calendar.

Overriding one ticket

Someone with Override a ticket’s SLA (team leads and up) can change the due times of one ticket from its SLA panel.

What the queue says

While a clock is stopped, the queue and the ticket say why: “Paused for Christmas Day, resumes Mon 09:00”, “Waiting on requester”. Editing a calendar, a holiday or a team target re-times the open tickets it affects. From 1.19.1, re-timing a ticket from its creation takes off the time it spent paused in business hours, not whole nights and weekends. For tickets paused before 1.19.1 that time is estimated.

What requesters see

When the team that will answer is closed, Get help says so on the form and on the request, with when it opens again.

Waits and reminders in workflows

Workflow waits, task due dates and approval reminders count calendar time by default: “after 24 hours” is 24 hours from the step’s start, nights and weekends included. From 1.19.1 each can count business days or business hours in a team’s calendar instead, skipping weekends and the team’s holidays. See Counting business time.

Recurring tickets also follow a team’s holidays.

In the audit log

Action	Shown as
helpdesk.team.created / .updated / .deleted	Created / Edited / Deleted helpdesk team
helpdesk.team.members_changed	Changed helpdesk team members
helpdesk.calendar.created / .updated / .deleted	Created / Edited / Deleted a helpdesk calendar
helpdesk.holiday_set.created / .updated / .deleted	Created / Edited / Deleted a holiday list
helpdesk.team.calendar_changed	Changed a team’s office hours
helpdesk.sla.updated	Changed helpdesk reply targets
helpdesk.team.sla_updated / .sla_reset	Changed / Reset a team’s SLA targets