Setting Availability Schedules

One of Callingly's most essential and flexible features is individual scheduling for your Teams and Users. This ensures that Users only receive calls when they can take them. It also ensures that every Lead is routed to an available User at the right time.

supervisor_accountOwners and Admins can change schedules. Approx. reading time 4 min.

Basic overview of schedules

Every Team in Callingly has a schedule, as does every User. When a Lead is routed to a Team, Callingly will first check the Team schedule. If the Team is available for calls, Callingly will determine which Users on the Team are currently available and will route the Lead to them.

This allows you to put Users on multiple Teams or let Users have schedules different from the Team schedule. If nobody is available for the call, inbound calls are sent to voicemail, while outbound calls are rescheduled, so long as this setting is turned on.

Schedules can be set per day of the week and in any time zone. Times are in 15-minute intervals, and you can have unlimited chunks of time in a day. As with most of our features, this can be customized further. If you'd like that, please reach out to our support team.

How to set schedules

Schedules exist at the Team level as well as the User level. The scheduler works the same way for both, so we'll first tell you how to navigate to each scheduler, then how to use it.

Team schedules

From the Teams page of your Callingly account:

1.: Click the settingsSettings button to the right of the Team you'd like to edit. A new panel will slide open.
2.: Press the scheduleEdit Schedule button at the bottom of the panel.

You can use the Setting a schedule section below to set the schedule.

User schedules

From the Users page of your Callingly account, click the scheduleSchedule button to the right of the User you'd like to edit. A new page will open. You can use the setting a schedule section below to set the schedule.

Setting a schedule

After navigating to the schedule, use the screenshot and list below to help understand the actions you can take on the scheduling screen.

1	Toggle the switch Off/On to allow or disallow calls each day.
2	Use the dropdown menus to select start and end times if allowing calls on a specific day. You can choose times every quarter hour. info_outline Note: By default, users are available All Day, every day of the week, so you'll want to edit this for each user!
3	Press the add button to add another period for the same day. tips_and_updates Tip: You'd make use of the + button to provide a lunch break or if someone works a night shift that crosses between two calendar days.
4	Click the closeclose button to remove a period.
5	Press the event_repeatCalendar to the right of Monday to fill in Monday's settings for the rest of the business week.
6	Select the correct timezone from the dropdown list. The current time in the selected time zone is displayed above the dropdown menu to help double-check that you've chosen the right one.
7	Remember to Save!

Add a lunch shift

Creating a lunch shift is pretty simple: instead of a person working a single shift in a day, think of them as working two shifts.

Let's say Dwight works from 8 am until 5 pm Monday through Friday. He takes a one-hour lunch every day at 11 am. To create his schedule, toggle off Sunday and Saturday so that he's not on call those days. Then add a time block every day from 8 am until 11 am and another from 12 pm until 5 pm.

tips_and_updates

Tip: We recommend providing a 15-minute buffer on either side of a shift. This helps ensure that a user is ready to receive a call at the start of a shift. It also prevents them being held over by receiving a call as they are meant to head out. In the example above, Dwight's phone schedule would be 8:15 am - 10:45 am and 12:15 pm - 4:45 pm.

Add a night shift

Uh oh. Dwight's been put on the night shift as disciplinary action for playing too many pranks on his coworker Jim. So we'll need to rearrange his schedule for the time being. For the foreseeable future, Dwight's shift will start at 9 pm, and his lunch break will be at 1 am each day.

Based on a 24-hour clock, Dwight works one shift on Monday, three shifts Tuesday through Friday, and two on Saturday. The table below outlines this:

Hour	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday - Friday	Saturday
12:00 am	OFF	OFF	ON	ON
1:00 am	OFF	OFF	LUNCH	LUNCH
2:00 am	OFF	OFF	ON	ON
3:00 am	OFF	OFF	ON	ON
4:00 am	OFF	OFF	ON	ON
5:00 am	OFF	OFF	ON	ON
6:00 am - 8:00 pm		OFF	OFF	OFF
9:00 pm	OFF	ON	ON	OFF
10:00 pm	OFF	ON	ON	OFF
11:00 pm	OFF	ON	ON	OFF

Pro-tip

Reschedule calls if the team is offline.

If a Lead comes in when no Users are set as available, a call to that Lead can automatically be scheduled for the next available time slot. This typically happens if a Lead comes in during the middle of the night, meaning a call will be planned with them first thing the following day.

This setting is turned on by default, but if you find this isn't happening for you, it's possible it was previously turned off in your account. You can re-enable it on a per-Team basis. From the Teams page of your Callingly account:

1.: Click the settings Settings button for the Team you'd like to edit. A new panel will slide open.
2.: Turn On the toggle under the header Reschedule Calls If Team Offline found near the bottom of the panel.

If multiple leads come in during the same offline time, they will be scheduled to receive calls first thing the following day. Calls will be at 15-minute intervals to ensure your team isn't overloaded.

Common Questions

Can my employee set their own schedule?

They sure can! Owners and Admins can provide Agents and Managers access to the My Schedule page. This allows them to change their own schedule and change their Do Not Disturb status. To learn more about this, please take a look at the instructions in our article Understanding & Changing User Roles.