Business Hours

Business Hours Overview

The Business Hours feature lets you create schedules for regular working hours and extra working hours, and to close the contact center for holidays or emergencies. It provides the mechanism for routing these contacts to specific support teams based on the configured work hour schedules, holidays, emergency closures, or extra working hours. You can create Business Hour schedules for various scenarios for various contact center teams. This feature helps you create and apply several Business Hour schedules to the same team. On the other hand, you could apply the same Business Hour schedule to several support teams.

When a customer contacts the contact center, the response by the contact center is based on the status of the support team. This status is evaluated using the Business Hour configured for the team.

Use this feature to:

  • Configure default working hours (regular hours) for contact center teams for each day of the week. This option is not applicable to 24x7 support teams.

  • Configure the special hours for the contact center team or teams for any special days such as Sale days or holidays.

  • Force Close the contact center for any emergency such as a natural calamity.

  • Force Open the contact center on a holiday or a non-working day to cater to specific business requirements such as Sale days.

  • Create and deploy customer notifications that are based on Business Hour status.

Define the status reasons for business hours and assign codes for each status reason. Status reason is required when you force open or force close a business hour, and when you add special hours and holidays.

Contact Center Enterprise Reference Design Support for Business Hours

Unified CCE supports Business Hours for these reference designs:

  • 2000 Agents

  • 4000 Agents

  • 12000 Agents

  • 24000 Agents

Business Hours Use Cases

Use the Business Hours feature to manage the incoming customer calls or digital channel contacts to your teams , by routing these contacts based on the Business Hours you configure.

Use the Business Hour status in an IF node in scripts to control the call and digital channel contacts, such as email and chat, and notify the customers accordingly.

You can have Business Hours scripts for the following treatments:

  • When the business is open, route calls and digital contacts to the applicable skill groups and precision queues.

  • When the business is closed, play the message for the closed status with the appropriate Status Reason and terminate the call. Route the digital contacts to the appropriate queues.

  • When the business is not open 24x7, route the calls to skill groups and precision queues for after-hours support or play the after-hours message.

  • When the business is open 24x7, at a predefined time before the end of each shift, route the calls and digital contacts to the appropriate queues for the next shift.

  • When the business is closed for an emergency on a working day, notify the customers contacting your contact center appropriately about the emergency closing.

Based on reason code and status, the customers will hear appropriate prompts on the call.

Set the Principal AW for Business Hours

You must specify and set the Principal AW before configuring the Business Hours.

The Principal AW (Admin Workstation) is responsible for managing background tasks that are run periodically to sync configuration with other solution components, such as SSO management, Smart Licensing, etc.

Procedure

Step 1

In Unified CCE Administration, go to Infrastructure > Inventory.

Step 2

Click the AW that you want to set as Principal AW.

The Edit CCE AW window opens.

Step 3

Select the Principal AW check box.

Step 4

Enter the Unified CCE Diagnostic Framework Service domain, username, and password.

Step 5

Click Save.

Step 6

Restart Tomcat service on Principal AW machine.

Business Hours Set Up Workflow

This section provides information necessary to set up the Business Hours feature.

Table 1. Business Hours Set Up Workflow

Tasks

Documentation

Scripting for Business Hours

Business Hours Variables and Dynamic Formula for Business Hours in the Scripting and Media Routing Guide for Cisco Unified ICM/Contact Center Enterprise at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-user-guide-list.html

Business Hours Configuration

Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-maintenance-guides-list.html

Scripting for Business Hours

To enable scripting for Business Hours, use the following variables:

  • Business Hour Status—The real time status based on the configured Business Hours.

  • Reason Code— The reason code associated with the current status.

These variables must be used in the CCE script IF node to route the customer contacts.

Business Hours Configuration

Business hours can be configured by defining the following:

  • Default Open/Close (as per Business Calendar): The status of the regular hours.

  • Force Open: Force the status of Business Hours to Open with a reason code.

  • Force Closed: Force the status of Business Hours to Closed with a reason code.

  • 24x7 setting: Set the schedules for 24x7 working. Status is Always Open.

  • Special Hours & Holiday: Configure a holiday or special day. On a holiday, you can close the Business Hours for the whole day or open it for specific hours. On a special day, you can configure extra working hours (in cases where 24x7 working is not set), the evaluation stops when the Special Hours & Holiday step is evaluated and the status is derived from this step. Further Business Hours setting for that day will not be evaluated.

  • Custom: Configure the regular working hours for a weekday and, if necessary, specify the working hours for each day in a week.

The following variables control this feature:

  • Time Zone: The line of Business or team’s operational time zone.

  • Reason Code: Reason code for special days and Force Open/Close status.

    Apply the appropriate reason codes when you configure a Business Hour with Force Open, Force Close, and Special Hours & Holidays. When these Business Hour schedules are in effect, the associated reason code is available in the scripting environment and the real time reports. Reason Code configuration is not available for regular weekdays. In such cases, the system reports the default open and default close reason codes.

Configure Yearly Schedules

You can configure and maintain a Business hours calendar for the whole year.

  • Configure the regular working hours for weekdays.

  • Configure Special Hours & Holidays schedules for whole year by doing the following:

    • Add the Special Hours & Holidays details for all the special hours and holidays for the whole year into the CSV template file.

    • On the Import Special Hours & Holidays page, click Choose File and browse to the special hours and holidays file.

      Click Import to upload the file.

      After you import the configuration file, the configurations are loaded on the Business Hours page. Validate the configurations.

    • Click Save.


Note

When you update the configured Business Hours, remove any elapsed schedules and then update the new schedules for any new special hours or holidays in a Business Hour configuration.

Daylight Saving Time

The Business Hours feature uses Time Zone to determine the status based on the Business Hours configured. Time Zone is set based on the local time. When the daylight saving time (DST) settings are applicable to any Time Zone, the status is automatically adjusted for DST.

When time zones are added or updated, the DST information changes. Apply all the Operating System (OS) updates related to time zones and DST, to both sides A and B of the deployment.

Business Hours Status Evaluation

The status is evaluated using the following order of the configured Business Hour settings:

  1. Open/Close as per Business Calendar

  2. Force Open or Close

  3. Special Hours and Holiday schedule

  4. 24x7 setting

  5. Regular hour schedules

The evaluation terminates at the step at which the status is determined.

For example, if Special Hours & Holidays is configured, the evaluation stops when the Special Hours & Holiday step is evaluated and the status is derived from this step.

If any configuration is changed, the status is re-evaluated and updated to reflect the change.