Published August 16, 2026

Business Hours, Groups and Routing

Three settings that decide where a ticket goes and when the clock runs. Get them wrong and everything downstream reports nonsense.

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Business hours

Schedules define when your team is working, and everything time-based depends on them: SLA targets, automations that fire on ageing tickets, and any report that measures elapsed time.

You can run several schedules, which matters for follow-the-sun teams or for a brand with different support hours. Holidays belong here too, and forgetting them is the classic cause of a bad SLA month every December.

Groups

Groups are teams. A ticket is assigned to a group first and a person second, which is the pattern that stops tickets belonging to somebody who is on holiday.

Keep the number small. Every group needs its own views, its own routing rules and somebody watching its unassigned queue. Groups that nobody watches are where tickets go to age.

Routing that holds up

Route to a group, not a person. Personal assignment is how a ticket waits three days for one agent to come back.

Have a default. Every ticket that matches nothing must land somewhere watched, not in a void.

Watch the unassigned view. The most valuable view in any Zendesk instance.

Do not over-route. Ten narrow rules that each catch three tickets a week are ten rules to maintain and debug.

What this has to do with duplicates

Routing spreads related tickets across teams. When the same customer writes twice and the two tickets are worded differently enough to route to different groups, neither agent ever sees the other ticket.

That is a routing side effect rather than a routing failure, and it is why duplicate detection has to work across the whole account rather than inside one view.