Centralized, reusable business-hours and holiday schedules for users and call queues
Summary of the request: The customer wants to create multiple company-wide business-hours schedules and holiday schedules in one central place. They want to assign these schedules to users and call queues. When a central schedule changes, every user and queue assigned to it should update automatically.
Current behavior and gap:
- Business hours and holiday rules are set per user, per call queue, or per site.
- The only alternative is applying templates.
- Templates don't work for this customer's call queues. Each queue forwards voicemail to a different external voicemail destination, so a template would overwrite them all with the same number.
- The customer has 54 call queues. Each one needs its own custom "Holiday" rule with every holiday added, plus a call-handling rule that sends calls to the external voicemail. All of this is done by hand.
Desired behavior:
- Create several named company-wide business-hours schedules. The customer's examples are a standard clinic schedule and an Urgent Care schedule.
- Create separate holiday schedules, such as Holidays and Urgent Care Holidays. Holidays should be able to recur annually.
- Assign a schedule and a holiday schedule to any user, call queue or IVR, and change the assignment later.
- Changing a schedule once should update everything assigned to it.
- Keep per-user overrides for staff with slightly different hours.
- Keep each queue's own after-hours and holiday destination, such as its external voicemail number, separate from the schedule.
Example scenario: The standard hours are 8:00 to 4:30, Monday to Friday. In the busy season the customer extends them to 8:00 to 5:00. They want to make that change once and have it apply to all assigned users and queues.
Business impact:
- Manual holiday setup across 54 queues is time-consuming and error-prone.
- The customer says this is the feature they miss most from their previous provider. They described that provider's setup as schedules at enterprise, location and user level, with recurring holiday events.
- It is a competitive gap, so there is a retention and satisfaction risk.
Current workaround: Configure each queue by hand (Phone System > Groups > Call Queues > queue > Settings > Schedule). Add a custom rule with a Date and Time condition for holidays. Templates are not viable for this customer.