How to update your business hours

The Specialty Answering Service portal gives you the ability to adjust your business hours within any profile. However, the business hours listed here are not used to answer questions such as 'Are you open' and 'When do you close'; rather, they are used as companions to advanced features within the SAS call script, and reporting capabilities in the SAS Portal. You should adjust your business hours if you are:

• Routing Calls Differently Based on Business Hours: If you have steps in your script that direct our operators to different paths based on whether the call was received during or after business hours, those hours will be controlled here.
• Tracking Calls Received by Business Hours: In the Reports section of the SAS Portal under the heading Call Traffic Report, you'll find a report called Calls by Business Hours. The business hours used to run this report will be those set in your profile.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to do a few things:

• Locate your Business Hours Settings: We'll show you how to access the edit screen from your SAS portal.
• Update your Business and Lunch Hours: Once you've found the correct profile, we'll show you how to change and save your new settings.

Where to Find Business Hours Settings

1. From the home page, click on  Profiles from the navigation menu on the left. 

You will see a list of all profiles on your account. Profiles refer to different places you want messages sent after a call closes. For example, you may need emergency calls sent to a different email address or cell phone number than sales calls. Each Profile also has configurable business hours. 

How to Update Open and Lunch Hours

Let’s say that for script paths linked to the Sales profile in this example, you want calls transferred to SAS during the day, and a message taken at night. Business hours need to be adjusted accordingly.

1. From the profile page, scroll down to the bottom where you will see  Business hours settings. First, make sure your Time Zone is correct. The time zone value will usually be the the same time zone as your own business.

2. Next, you'll need to edit your  Open hours. Click the checkboxes under each day of the week that your business is open, and adjust the From and To hours.

3. If you take a Lunch at a set time every day and you do not want to be contacted during that time, be sure to add those hours in as well. If a call hits our system during Lunch hours, it will be considered 'after hours' and the after hours path will be shown to the agents. Similarly, if we are scheduling appointments, lunch hours will be unavailable.

NOTE: If you have any Time-Based routing steps in your script, you can also use the Closed Settings to govern where transfers are going after hours.

4. Once you have entered the applicable business hours, click the yellow  Update button next to Business hours settings. If your changes have been saved successfully, you will see this message.

Congratulations! To test if you've updated your settings correctly, you can navigate your call script. If you're using business hours routing within your script, you'll see either the business hours or after hours script displayed depending on when you are accessing the script.