Business Hours are the timeframes when a customer is available to receive you. Preferred business hours are marked with a P.
To edit, right-click the edit-icon . The following page opens:
For each day of the week, you can enter one or two periods during which the customer is open for customer calls. If you do not find the desired times in the selection boxes, click the keyboard symbol to the right of the input fields and enter the times manually in minutes and hours. To quickly delete a period, click the recycle bin icon. Click the down arrow icon to apply the day's periods for the next day of the week.
Click Save to apply your changes, which will be applied immediately upon the next schedule calculation.
Customers without business hours cannot be scheduled automatically by portatour®.
To reset the business hours of this customer to the default business hours defined in the options, click Use default (see section Business hours of customers).
Hints for handling business hours
portatour® automatically ensures that the start of a customer call is within the indicated business hours. Exceeding opening hours with the call duration is possible depending on the configuration.
If you want to ensure that portatour® always schedules the entire call within the business hours, then proceed as follows:
- Click Options and then the menu item Scheduling parameters in the Call parameters section.
- In the drop-down menu Adherence to business hours click Entire call (see also section Scheduling parameters of customers).
Please note that through this setting you will generally have less time for calls and thus fewer calls will be scheduled. Customers' lunch breaks have an especially limiting effect.
Business hours have no effect on manually created appointments at a customer. That is to say, if the appointment is outside of business hours, it will still be scheduled by portatour® at the time indicated.
Preferred calling times
If you prefer visiting the customer on certain days or at certain times, click on Preferred openings on the editing page. A checkbox appears next to each business hours area, where you can mark the preferred times.
Preferred openings cause portatour® to preferably schedule the customer within this time frame. Beware that under certain circumstances this may cause slightly longer travel times. In case the detour is too long or the customer is not available within the preferred business hours due to conflicting appointments, portatour® will fall back to the non-preferred business hours.
In terms of travel optimization we recommend to deal economically with the preferred call timestamps and use them only for important reasons. If you want to use preferred business hours for a customer then you better highlight several time frames rather than just one.