What are Opening Hours?

Opening Hours defines when your support team is available across channels and teams. Unlike simple “9-5 Monday-Friday” settings, Atender supports multiple independent rules — so you can model Phone team covers 8am-noon, but email is 24/7, or English support around the clock, Norwegian support 8-17 weekdays, all in the same workspace.

What an opening-hours rule is

A rule is one self-contained schedule. It doesn’t carry a team or channel scope: you assign rules to teams and channels on the Coverage tab of Settings → Opening hours, where each team and channel pair is one cell. A cell with no assignment uses the workspace default rule, or is always open when there is no default. You can have one rule for the whole company, or fifty rules for fine-grained coverage. Each rule has:

• Name — A descriptive label (e.g. Phone Team Weekdays, Email 24/7, Holiday Phone Hours)
• Weekly schedule — Per-day time slots, with split-shift support
• Timezone — Auto-detected from browser, overridable per rule
• Holiday calendar — Country code that imports public holidays
• Date overrides — Specific dates marked closed or set to custom hours

Why multiple rules

Because real teams don’t all work the same hours. A few examples:

• Channel-specific availability — phone team is live 8am-12pm; email is asynchronously monitored 24/7. Two rules, assigned to different channel columns, different schedules.
• Language-specific coverage — English support 24/7 across all channels; Norwegian support weekdays 8-17. Two rules, assigned to different teams’ rows.
• Holiday hours — reduced hours on certain dates, set as date overrides on the phone team’s rule. Each cell holds one rule, so rules aren’t layered over each other.
• Channel + team combinations — Premium chat team is 24/7; standard chat team is business hours only.

Trying to express any of these with a single global “office hours” setting forces compromises. Multiple rules let each team and channel have honest hours.

What downstream features do with opening hours

Opening hours are read by other parts of the product:

• SLA policies pause their timers outside business hours by default — see Run an SLA 24/7 for the exception. The SLA follows the hours set for the conversation’s team and channel. A team with no hours set, and a conversation with no team yet, use the default hours. When an agent or a team lead moves the conversation to another team, an automation assigns it, the AI hands it over, or the conversation switches channel, the deadline is counted again in the new team’s hours.
• Automation rules can be scoped to fire only inside or outside business hours via schedule restrictions.
• Voice IVR flows check the schedule via the Is Open node, routing after-hours callers to voicemail or a different queue.
• Web chat widget uses the schedule to show availability state (“we’re online” / “back tomorrow at 9am”) to visitors before they engage.

This is why getting opening hours right is foundational. Several other features pivot on it.

Where to start

• Set up your basic schedule: Set up your team’s opening hours
• Add holidays: Configure holidays and date overrides
• Distributed teams: Set up split shifts and multi-timezone hours
• Which rule applies to a conversation: Rule resolution reference
• SLA not pausing as expected: Why is my SLA timer counting outside business hours?