Alert business days

Reporting > Action > Alerts > Type Settings > Alert Business Days

Note: This topic describes Alert management using Medallia Setup. Although some Alert properties are common between Setup and Admin Suite, some options can only be configured with Admin Suite, and these may have unintended effects on Setup options. For more information about these differences, see Differences between and issues with managing alerts in Setup and Admin Suite. For information about configuring Alerts with Admin Suite, see Alerts.

Alert business days are the days of the week timers use when calculating trigger delays. New alert notifications are sent out, but no workflow activities resulting from triggers happen non-business days, and the excluded days are ignored when calculating timer delays. This keeps overdue, escalated, and exclude actions from happening when there is no one at work to handle it. For example, when Saturday and Sunday are excluded, and an overdue timer is set to expire at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, it will not actually expire until Monday at 11:00.

Time line of two alerts both triggered on Wednesday and expiring in three days: one expires on Saturday, the other Monday because weekends are excluded

Business days are specific to an alert; different alerts can have different business days. Alert notifications can be paused based on Alert Holiday Calendars. Define triggers on the Alert triggers screen.

The days are in the timezone set for the Unit Group's TimeZone value, as described in Unit groups admin.

Setting business days

By default, all days of the week are included as business days. To exclude some days for an Alert:

  1. On the Alert type settings screen, select the Alert.
  2. In the Business days list, chose the days to exclude. This set excludes Saturday and Sunday.

Setup screen for the Business days property with Saturday and Sunday excluded

Note: Timers calculate the business day exclusions when the timer is created. For Absolute delays, this happens when the Alert is put in the New state. For Relative timers, this happens when the timer is started or reset, such as after adding a note. As such, changing the Business Day days will not affect any absolute timers in existing open Alerts, but will affect relative timers.

Reporting considerations

When reporting the length of time an alert was open, exclude the days the alert was open during non-business days using the a_alert_business_days_excluded_time A-Field. This field accumulates the amount of time a survey record spent in excluded days.

Note: This field updates every time the Alert changes state; it does not update for activities that do not change the state, such as adding a note to the Alert instance.

For example, to report on alert resolution time excluding the non-business days, you can use a K-Field to subtract the time. For example, this code determines the length of time between when a Alert was opened and when it was closed. When that time is greater than zero (indicating the alert has been closed), the excluded time is removed from the difference, and the result is returned in hours (1,000 milliseconds x 60 second x 60 minutes).

c = a_alert_date_created;
r = a_alert_date_closed;
t = a_alert_business_days_excluded_time;
d = millisDifference(c,r);
if (d) { Math.round((d - t)/(1000*60*60)); }