Business hours and holidays in one call flow

Holiday routing works when the calendar lives inside the phone menu's hours step, is shared by every menu, and is checked before any phone rings. Then a holiday is one dated entry with its own message, and the order of decisions is the same every call.

Every call to a number bound to a phone menu runs the same four checks, in this order, before any desk rings. Holidays go wrong on most phone systems because the calendar is consulted after a desk has started ringing; a fixed order at the top of the menu is the fix.

1. The "we are closed right now" switch. If it is on, the call takes the emergency exit and nothing else is consulted.
2. Are any hours set at all? If the schedule has no weekly hours, the line is open. Blank means open, never closed.
3. Is today a holiday? If today's date is on the schedule's list, the call takes the holiday exit, even on a Tuesday.
4. The weekly hours. Otherwise the day and the time decide open or closed, in the location's own time zone.

The hours step therefore has four exits, open, holiday, emergency and closed, each leading to its own message or destination. The caller on 24 June hears "closed for the Fête nationale, back Thursday"; the caller at nine on a Tuesday evening hears the ordinary closed greeting. Neither hears ringing.

If the menu does not exist yet, start with how to build a phone menu that does not lose callers. This post asks where its calendar goes.

Where the calendar lives matters more than what is on it. Many systems keep hours on each menu or each number, so a business with a main line, a department line and a French menu has three copies of the same holidays. Somebody updates two of them.

In Ringfully the hours are a saved schedule, attached to a location. A menu names the schedule; it does not carry its own copy. Every menu that names the same schedule closes on the same days. Add a date once and every menu that uses that schedule has it, without a publish.

The other half of that design: a number not bound to a menu is never checked, and rings around the clock on purpose. Closing a line is something you opt into by putting the number on a menu with an hours step, never something applied because a field was filled in somewhere.

A holiday is not an evening. "Closed until nine tomorrow" and "closed today for Canada Day" are different sentences, and a system with only open and closed makes you pick one for both.

In the schedule, a holiday is one dated entry with a label. On that date the call takes the holiday exit whatever the weekly hours say, so a holiday on a normal working day still closes the line. The holiday exit carries the message you put on it and can lead somewhere the closed exit does not: a voicemail box with a different greeting, or a message that gives the return date.

The honest limit: entries are dates, not rules. The schedule does not know that Christmas is every 25 December, and cannot know that Good Friday or the Journée nationale des patriotes move. Each year, the coming year's dates go in by hand. That is twenty minutes, once, in one sitting:

• Enter the fixed dates, then work out the moving ones and enter those.
• Check the schedule's time zone. Dates and hours are read in that zone, not the caller's.
• Check which numbers are bound to a menu that names the schedule. A number outside any menu rings on every holiday.
• Listen to the holiday exit. The right date with an unwritten message closes the line to silence.

Which dates differ in Quebec is a separate question, covered in the post linked at the end.

There is no recurring-holiday rule: a holiday is a date, and next year's date is yours to enter. There is no automatic provincial calendar; we do not fill in Quebec's holidays for you. A schedule with no hours set is open, which is why a half-configured line still rings. Your first schedule is one of the things we set up with you at the start, alongside what a plan includes and what it costs.

The "we are closed right now" switch is not the calendar. It is for the day nobody planned, and it has its own post.

The hours step, its four exits and the shared schedule are described on call menus and hours.

Related: which statutory holidays differ in Quebec, and what they do to a phone menu built elsewhere.