Setting Business Hours: The Key to Maximizing Service Availability

You risk unhappy customers and lost business if you don’t offer 24/7 service.

But humans can’t always be available—we have lives outside of work. So, how can you meet the demand for constant support? The answer is simple: technology.

To achieve 24/7 support, align your business hours with customers’ expectations by adopting a follow-the-sun support model. This means handing off customer queries to teams in different time zones as needed. 

When no one is available, technology can bridge the gap and keep things running smoothly.

In this article, we’ll explore how setting clear business hours can boost customer satisfaction and improve your overall support strategy. 

We’ll also discuss how using the right technology, like automated systems and global support models, ensures that help is always just a click away, even when your team isn’t available.

Table of Contents

• What are business hours?
• Factors influencing business hours
• Strategies for optimizing business hours
• Tools and technologies for extended support
• Set business hours or offer 24/7 support?
• Implementing customer-centric business hours with Hiver

What are business hours?

Business hours are the designated times when a company is available to provide customer service or support.

For most companies, these hours usually fall between 9 AM and 6 PM, Monday to Friday. Of course, holidays may shift these hours.

However, the traditional 9-to-5 is no longer enough in today’s always-on world. Customers now expect support beyond standard hours, pushing businesses to adopt more flexible or round-the-clock support models to meet these demands.

Traditional vs. modern business hours

While traditional 9-to-5 schedules worked for many businesses, modern customer expectations now push for more flexibility, including 24/7 support. 

Let’s compare these two models.

Standard 9-to-5 Model

• Simple, predictable, and cost-effective for businesses operating in a single time zone.
• Suitable for small or local businesses where immediate, after-hours support isn’t critical.
• Can lead to delays and dissatisfaction for global or tech-savvy customers expecting fast responses.

Modern 24/7 Model

• Ensures round-the-clock support to meet global customer demands.
• Reduces wait times and boosts customer satisfaction.
• Requires tools like chatbots, self-service portals, and distributed teams to maintain efficiency without overwhelming staff.

Shift towards 24/7 availability

New-age consumers demand swift resolutions and readily available support—at all hours of the day or night. With more and more businesses serving customers worldwide, 24/7 availability no longer remains a luxury–it’s a necessity.

The transition to 24/7 support is not only about being available outside your standard work hours. It’s also about ensuring that your customers feel supported whenever and however they require help–whether they’re in another timezone or are dealing with an after-hours emergency. Organizations that swear by this approach enjoy faster resolutions to customer inquiries, higher satisfaction, and stronger competitive advantage.

As customers’ support requirements evolve, companies are increasingly seeking tools and technologies that facilitate seamless 24/7 service delivery. 

Just how Hiver uses Hiver to deliver round-the-clock support to all its customers.

Hiver’s support team is available 24/7 across all plans, ensuring no customer query goes unanswered. Whether it’s the middle of the night or a busy weekend, Hiver keeps things moving. What does this mean for businesses? Faster resolution and happy customers, even if they’re in a different time zone or dealing with a late-night emergency.

In fact, Hiver has raised the bar with some impressive numbers. Their first-call resolution rate is 88%—well above the industry average of 40%. Their average chat response time is 13 seconds, nearly three times faster than the industry’s typical 45 seconds.

With a 95% CSAT score, Hiver customers clearly appreciate the speed and quality of their support—surpassing the industry average of 92%. 

It’s clear that companies that embrace round-the-clock support can capitalize on faster resolutions, higher satisfaction rates, and seamless service delivery to foster lasting customer relationships and experience long-term growth.

Factors influencing business hours

How businesses set their hours isn’t just a matter of tradition—several factors come into play. 

Let’s explore the key influences shaping your schedule.

1. Industry norms and evolving customer expectations

The interplay between industry standards and customer demands plays a significant role in shaping business hours. For traditional sectors like banking, the 9-to-5 schedule remains the norm. Yet, industries like tech, e-commerce, and SaaS are moving towards 24/7 availability to meet growing expectations. 

According to Lithium, 78% of consumers expect a response within an hour, with over 50% seeking immediate support, even outside regular business hours. This shift stems from the rise of on-demand services, where instant gratification has become the standard. Businesses that fail to adapt to these expectations risk losing loyalty to competitors who prioritize availability.

2. Global markets and time zones

Global markets don’t sleep, and neither do your customers. With clients spread across time zones, 24/7 support isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a must. That’s why many successful businesses use a follow-the-sun model, seamlessly handing off support between teams worldwide to ensure uninterrupted availability.

The result? Customers get the help they need whenever they need it, which means happier customers, stronger loyalty, and a real boost in retention.

3. Team Capacity and Resources

Offering 24/7 or extended support is more than adding hours — it’s about ensuring you have the team and the tools in place to be able to do so feasibly. Companies should evaluate whether their current workforce can handle additional shifts without leading to burnout. If not, implementing flexible scheduling, skill development, outsourcing and AI-powered tools (such as chatbots) to automate daily tasks can help lighten workloads.
By aligning resources with demand, businesses can deliver exceptional service without overstretching their teams.

Strategies for optimizing business hours

When it comes to optimizing your business hours, it’s all about working smarter—not harder. Understanding your customers’ needs, analyzing patterns, and leveraging support models like follow-the-sun can help you deliver more efficient service and keep everyone happy. 

Here are some strategies you can implement right away:

1. Analyzing customer contact patterns

Understanding when customers are most likely to reach out is essential for optimizing support hours. Analyzing historical contact data allows businesses to identify peak interaction times and adjust schedules accordingly. 

This means allocating resources when and where they’re most needed so you can respond faster, improve service quality, and reduce customer frustration. For example, if your customer data shows a spike in inquiries around early mornings or weekends, you can allocate additional staff coverage during those times.

2. Implementing the follow-the-sun support model

If your business operates across different time zones, distribute support teams globally. This allows you to offer 24/7 support without overburdening any single team. It reduces wait times and ensures customers receive prompt assistance, regardless of location or time zone.

You can also create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for handoffs so your support teams can communicate and collaborate effectively.

3. Leveraging Technology and Automation

Leveraging technology can help you streamline support operations and increase efficiency. AI-powered chatbots and automated workflows enable organizations to respond to routine inquiries in real-time, freeing human agents to prioritize more complex matters.

By providing self-service portals, knowledge bases, and FAQs, customers can resolve their own issues whenever and wherever they like, reducing their dependence on live support. Automated ticket routing and SLA tracking help ensure that every query is prioritized and addressed in a timely manner, leading to faster response times and improved customer satisfaction.

When integrated, these technologies and strategies enable businesses to offer 24/7 support, scale support operations seamlessly, and offer a frictionless customer experience without additionally straining your team.

💡Pro Tip: Check out how setting business hours for a shared mailbox lets you define the operating hours for that mailbox.

Tools and technologies for extended support

As we discussed above, implementing the right software can make all the difference in managing extended support hours, improving response times, and ensuring efficient service delivery. 

Here are a few tools and technologies that can help optimize your business hours and boost customer satisfaction.

1. Customer Service Software

Customer service software provides timely and efficient support, even more so when you’re operating outside traditional business hours. It enables companies to streamline workflows, manage tickets, track response times, and meet service level agreements (SLAs). 

Let’s take a look at some top support solutions:

• Zendesk: Offers powerful features for managing tickets, automating responses, and tracking customer issues.
• Freshdesk: Great for organizing customer support tickets, automating tasks, and providing multi-channel support.
• Hiver: Focuses on streamlining customer support by integrating directly with Gmail, offering a collaborative team inbox, and helping agents stay organized.

Hiver also offers built-in SLA management that makes tracking response times and resolutions easy. You can set time-bound goals for ticket response and resolution, and the software automatically tracks their progress. If a ticket is at risk of breaching its SLA, Hiver sends alerts, allowing your team to take action before escalation. This ensures SLAs are consistently met and no ticket is missed.

Hiver integrates SLAs with time-tracking features like SLA-based reminders, automatic ticket escalation, and clear timelines to boost customer satisfaction. For example, if a customer submits a complex technical issue that can’t be solved within the two-hour SLA, Hiver automatically escalates the ticket to a higher tier of support. This ensures that your customers always receive prompt and efficient service, even when tickets require more specialized attention.

2. AI-powered Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots leverage natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to deliver real-time support, allowing companies to assist customers anytime—often without the need for human intervention.

Unlike traditional chatbots that follow rigid scripts, AI-driven bots offer more flexible and conversational responses.

Hiver’s AI Bot, Harvey, is designed to streamline customer interactions by delivering instant, accurate responses while seamlessly integrating with human support when needed. Designed to handle everyday queries, Harvey uses NLP and machine learning to comprehend context and humanize responses, delivering conversational and human-like replies. This shortens response times and ensures customers get replies quickly, even outside of business hours.

Additionally, Harvey makes support workflows easier by auto-closing conversations that don’t need follow-ups, suggesting replies to agents to speed response times, and summarizing lengthy emails so agents can understand issues faster. It offers seamless chatbot-to-agent handoff, enabling the smooth transfer of complex queries to live agents without breaking the customer experience.

3. Self-Service Portals and Knowledge Bases

While chatbots and agents are important, sometimes customers just want to help themselves. This is where self-service portals and knowledge bases come in.

Studies show that over 81% of customers prefer to solve problems independently. However, 40% of these customers still contact support agents after attempting to resolve the issue themselves.

To make self-service work, your knowledge base needs to be comprehensive, accurate, and easy to navigate. This can help your customers quickly solve their problems and avoid agent dependency.

Hiver enables customers to log and track issues independently through its Customer Portal, while its easy-to-edit Knowledge Base supports quick self-service resolutions. Integrated with live chat, these tools offer instant access to information—enhancing satisfaction, speeding up service delivery, and allowing agents to focus on more complex issues, especially during extended business hours.

Set business hours or offer 24/7 support?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when deciding between traditional business hours and offering round-the-clock support. 

While 24/7 support may seem appealing, it comes with its own set of challenges like staffing, operational costs, and ensuring consistent quality. Customers are often more than willing to wait for a response during regular business hours, especially if they know when to expect it.

The key is clear communication. If you can’t offer 24/7 support, that’s okay, be transparent with your customers. 

• Let them know your business hours up front, whether on your website or in your customer service communication. 
• Set clear expectations around response times, and ensure you stick to them. 
• Offer self-service options like FAQs or a knowledge base during off-hours to mitigate the need for immediate human support.

Ultimately, it’s about finding the right balance. 24/7 support can be great, but only if you can manage it effectively. 

For most businesses, structured hours combined with well-managed expectations and automated tools like AI-powered chatbots can deliver an equally satisfactory experience. The goal is to ensure that your customers know when and how they can reach you and feel heard and supported when they do.

Implementing customer-centric business hours with Hiver

While traditional 9-to-5 hours are standard, they don’t always meet your customers’ needs. Customers might require assistance outside those hours, so it’s important to offer flexibility to meet their expectations.

Providing extended hours or 24/7 support doesn’t mean being always available. What truly matters is ensuring customers can reach you when they need assistance. This requires setting clear expectations and offering convenient communication channels for both parties.

With the right tools, like Hiver, you can manage support seamlessly. Whether you set SLAs, use chatbots, or enable self-service options, you can provide a smooth experience for your customers.

Try Hiver free for a week and experience the difference for yourself.