How to stop Zendesk SLAs counting on holidays

Zendesk SLA targets pause on holidays only when two things are true: the target counts business hours, and the holiday is on the ticket's business schedule. Set Hours of operation to business hours in each SLA policy, then use Holitide to add every public holiday for the schedule's countries and regions. Zendesk treats those days as outside business hours, so first reply and resolution targets don't run on them.

How Zendesk counts time on a holiday

Zendesk's schedules article says holidays you add to a schedule "will be treated as outside of business hours and not count toward any metrics you measure in business hours." An SLA target set to calendar hours keeps counting through the holiday. A target set to business hours stops at closing time the day before and starts again at opening time after.

Steps

1. Check the SLA policy. In Admin Center, go to Objects and rules > Business rules > Service level agreements and open the policy. For each priority's target, set Hours of operation to business hours. Zendesk's SLA article covers the rest of the policy.
2. Open Holitide from the left navigation bar and choose Set up next to the schedule your tickets use.
3. Add the regions. Pick each country and, if your team follows one, its state, province, nation or canton.
4. Choose the days you close. Public holidays are on. Add Bank holidays or Optional holidays only if the team is really off. Tick Observed days so a holiday moved off a weekend pauses SLAs on the weekday it's observed.
5. Add company days for your own closures, so a company offsite pauses SLAs too.
6. Check the preview, untick days you stay open, and choose Save and update Zendesk.
7. Repeat for each schedule if you're on Enterprise with several.

Several schedules, several holiday calendars

On Enterprise, the first schedule in the list is the default and applies to all tickets. Triggers with the action Ticket: Set schedule put other tickets on other schedules. That means each schedule needs the holidays of the team behind it: the UK schedule closes for UK holidays, the US schedule for US ones. In Holitide each schedule gets its own setup, so a German ticket's SLA pauses on German holidays and a US ticket's on US holidays.

Standard covers up to 3 schedules. Unlimited covers every schedule in the account.

Things to check

What it costs

Holitide Standard is $29 per Zendesk account per month for up to 3 schedules; Unlimited is $59 per Zendesk account per month for every schedule. There's a 14-day trial with a card, billed monthly by Zendesk. The Holitide documentation has every setting.