Customers don’t like to wait, and support agents shouldn’t have to work through the night to keep up.
Fast-growing global businesses often uncover a real tension: how do you deliver responses around the clock without burning your team members out?
The follow-the-sun support model solves that tension by spreading work across time zones, while enabling every team member to work normal daytime hours. Tickets keep moving towards resolution around-the-clock, giving customers the help they need without sacrificing your agents’ sleep.
I’ve been a part of several teams that have rolled out variants of a follow-the-sun support model with great success. We did this at Shopify to close the APAC gap and reduce pressure on the Americas and Europe. At Hospitable, we run a true global relay across APAC, Europe and the Americas, ensuring our hosts can get help at any hour.
These experiences have shaped how I think about customer experience, ticket handoffs, and what it really takes to make global coverage feel seamless to customers and sustainable for the team.
This guide explains what a follow-the-sun model is, the principles that make it work, the benefits and limitations, how to implement it, and how to set it up in Zendesk without chaos.
What Is a Follow-the-Sun Support Model?
A follow-the-sun support model is a global customer service strategy that provides 24/7 support to customers, without requiring any single team to work overnight shifts.
To make this happen, customers create support teams or support centers in different time zones around the world. As customer requests come in, they are routed to the region that is online at the moment.
As each time zone signs off, any open customer conversations are handed off to the new time zone that’s signing on, meaning customers keep moving without waiting for a single office to wake up.
The key difference from a traditional 24/7 plan is simple: no one is asked to work overnight to provide “always on” service.
Here is a practical follow-the-sun support model example from my Shopify days:
Let’s say an incident began in North America. When that team logged off, the APAC team picked it up and pushed the investigation forward. By the time Europe came online, they could validate a fix, ship a reply, and close the loop. Same incident, three regions, no idle time.
At Hospitable, the same pattern helps an anxious host at 3 a.m. get an agent right away instead of waiting until local business hours.
Source: Brianne Kimmel on X
This model pays off when you serve real audiences across multiple time zones and when delays are costly for customers.
It works best with consistent processes, a clean help center, and clear escalation paths. But it breaks down when teams work differently, when internal notes are thin, or when ownership is unclear during handoffs.
If multiple languages are in scope, you’ll want to build and refine your content system early so every region pulls from the same source of truth. Swifteq’s tools are a huge help here:
- Answer faster while keeping a consistent quality of your support even under high pressure with Agent Co-writer.
- Build and maintain a great Zendesk help center structure with Help Center Manager.
- See how customers are interacting with your knowledge base with Help Center Analytics.
- Unlock global multilingual support with Help Center Translate.
Wondering how these apps can help your business, schedule a short demo and we will show you.
Key Principles of a Follow-the-Sun Support Model
The follow-the-sun model only works if you can facilitate great handoffs between different time zones. Without that, you’re dead on arrival.
Every ticket should include a short internal summary, the current status, and the next actions the upcoming region should take.
As a support agent, that means writing notes for the person who will inherit the work, not for yourself. Your shorthand notes may make lots of sense to you, but can the next agent decipher what you’re saying?
When we raised the quality and standard of those notes at Shopify, resolution times dropped without adding more agents to the team.
When you have a global support team, you need a stable system and tech stack. In Zendesk, this means consistent definitions for everything from tags, to views, to macros, and to SLAs.
Shared tools and visibility also matter. A single help desk with role-based access prevents work from stalling inside a private view that the next region cannot see.
Trust across regions is not only a nice-to-have — it’s a requirement for this model to work. If agents don’t think the next region can deliver the same quality and level of support, then resentment can build up.
As a support lead, this means making sure that your teams around the globe are strong and capable, as well as connected to one another.
Several tools that help with that include:
- A shared Slack workspace and Loom video recordings. These enable people to actually connect and put faces to names, rather than just going through the motions without any sort of connection or mutual respect.
- Empowered agents. People should feel confident taking action without waiting for permission from a colleague who is asleep. Clear ownership rules and thoughtful coaching can make that confidence normal.
Source: GlobalCallForwarding Blog
Benefits & Challenges of Following the Sun
Benefits of Following the Sun
When the follow-the-sun model clicks, it brings benefits for customers, employees, and your business:
Customer benefits:
- Faster response times and quicker resolutions, since someone is always online and working.
- Higher customer satisfaction because wait time is decreased.
Employee benefits:
- Normal daytime working hours for all support agents, leading to reduced burnout and better work-life balance.
- Elimination of emergency night shifts and overtime fatigue.
- Ability to hire talent locally in each time zone rather than forcing distant workers into awkward hours.
Business benefits:
- Easier to meet SLAs because support doesn’t stop overnight.
- Higher team productivity since team members are working during their optimal hours.
- More sustainable workforce model that doesn’t rely on overworking any single team.
Challenges of Following the Sun
Seems simple enough, eh? But the trade-offs are real, and effectively using a follow-the-sun model isn’t always easy.
Challenges include:
- Coordinating across regions is harder than it may seem. Seamless handoffs are critical, but tough to execute. When a handoff gets messy, a customer’s issue may get stuck in limbo or lost.
- Inconsistent processes. If each region invents its own way of working, small differences become quality gaps. This can lead to inconsistent customer experiences.
- Culture and communication styles differ. Different regions have different norms and expectations. Information may get lost in translation and context may get confused.
When I was at Shopify, APAC customers moved from overnight waits to same-hour replies. Our North America team stopped staying late to push tickets over the line. Those were both huge wins.
But it wasn’t always that way.
The first version of our follow-the-sun model exposed gaps in our process.
For instance, when one region hesitated to take over escalations that another region considered routine, it led to delays and confusion. We fixed it by standardizing tags, adding a short “next action” line to every internal note, and reviewing a small sample of cross-timezone handoffs each week until new behaviors stuck.
How to Implement a Follow-the-Sun Model
When you’re thinking about a follow-the-sun support model, there are several factors to consider up front:
Start with your customers
Pull hourly volume by region and by ticket type. Validate weekends, holidays, and early morning peaks.
Don’t guess, especially if minutes matter for parts of your product such as bookings, payments, system access, or hardware control. In these areas, delays can carry a real cost. However, if most requests are low urgency and deflectable, you can begin with a lighter version or invest in self-service first.
Note: a strong self-service model is also available 24/7 and complements a follow-the-sun model really well.
Look at your team size and the shape of your demand
You do not need a huge support organization to start with a follow-the sun model. One strategic hire in a second region can create meaningful coverage.
As you slowly expand, confirm your tooling can route work by groups and business hours. Confirm your knowledge base is consistent and findable. If you plan to provide multilingual support, design your translation and review loop before you expand coverage.
If you’re using Zendesk, there’s no better tool for managing all of these help center tasks than Help Center Manager.
Consider the costs
Compare overtime and night shift premiums in your headquarters with the fully loaded cost of regional hiring. Global hiring can reduce labor premiums, but it adds training, management, and coordination costs.
Deciding if follow-the-sun support makes sense depends on your volume, complexity, and risk tolerance. Don’t forget to account for the onboarding time needed before you can truly offer full support in the new regions.
Consider your reporting ladder, too. Will you have Team Leads for each region reporting into a Manager? Or will you have a Team Lead who covers two regions? Do you have a Senior Manager or Director who can oversee the entire 24/7 model?
Make the reporting structure crystal clear and aligned to reduce any ambiguity.
Getting started with a follow-the-sun model
Let’s be very clear on one thing: start with a pilot, not a full rollout.
Here’s an example of what I’d do to launch a follow-the-sun model across a team that’s never done it before:
Pull hourly volume and identify two regions that create a clean handoff
Starting with two regions on opposite sides of the globe doesn’t make sense. Pick two neighboring time zones, and define a short overlap at shift change so the outgoing team can post final notes and the incoming team can ask quick clarifying questions.
Build the process
Standardize your naming scheme for tags, views, and macros before the pilot begins. Create a small handoff template inside the ticket (a Zendesk macro works great for this). This should include any links, a summary, what is done, what happens next, when it should happen, and who owns it now. Keep it short so people actually use it.
From there, you’ll want to configure routing in your help desk so new work goes to the right group based on business hours, language, brand, and priority.
You’ll also want to consider what happens for tickets that may be sitting in someone else’s view that get an update during that person’s off-hours. Will those be routed to someone else? If so, you’ll want to build out triggers to facilitate that handoff.
Train the team
Train the team on writing for the next region and on closing loops with customers when a handoff occurs. Start small — run your pilot for a month or two.
Each week, review a small sample of tickets that crossed time zones. Track where work stalled, and note what caused the handoff process to fail. Fix one root cause at a time.
When the pilot feels reliable, add a third region into the mix. Expand your language coverage once the core handoff behavior is consistent.
One good follow the sun support model example was my time at Shopify.
As we implemented this model at Shopify, we used heatmaps of contact & incident times to justify APAC hiring and to time our handoff windows. That choice kept risk low while we tested the process on high-value conversations. Once notes and routing were clean, we expanded to the full ticket queue and reduced on call shifts across the board.
Best Practices for Follow-the-sun Support
A playbook is always good to have. Based on my years working in follow-the-sun support models, here are a number of best practices worth keeping in mind:
- Keep one source of truth and alignment for tags, views, macros, and urgency scales better than a mix of things from different regions.
- Use asynchronous tools for alignment (instead of more meetings). Slack threads with a clear subject. Short screen recordings for tricky escalations.
- For major incidents, never forget to assign clear ownership.
- Add “next action” and “owner” to every internal note so accountability is unambiguous.
- Sample a handful of cross-timezone tickets from each region every week.
- Track the right metrics. I’d recommend first response, resolution time, and handoff count by region.
- Tie knowledge to the workflow by linking articles inside macros so every reply pulls the same guidance.
- Account for cultural differences where needed, but standardize as much as possible to reduce any friction.
Is a Follow-the-Sun Model a Fit for Your Business?
The follow-the-sun model can be a game-changer, but it’s not for everyone. Before you start planning hiring globally or building out your handoff process, let’s walk through some key considerations to figure out if it makes sense for your company.
Start with team size
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you have 8+ people in support roles, you can probably test this with two regions. But if you’re a lean team of 3 with basic documentation, adding global handoffs might create more confusion than help.
Don’t try implementing a follow-the-sun model until you reach the right size.
Consider your issue types
Think about what happens when your product breaks. If your tickets involve money, bookings, system downtime, or physical access, customers won’t be happy waiting until morning for help. Every hour of delay chips away at their trust.
But if most of your requests are simple how-to questions, good self-service options and regular business hours might be plenty.
At Shopify, the decision for us was obvious. When someone’s checkout fails at 3 AM, that’s not a “wait until morning” problem. It’s lost revenue happening in real time. We needed global coverage. The real work came in building smooth handoff processes so that coverage actually improved customer outcomes, not just looked good on paper.
Map your customers
This one’s crucial: where do your customers actually live? If 80% of your users are in one region, focus on perfecting support there before going global. Don’t spread yourself thin chasing coverage gaps that barely affect anyone.
Pull actual hourly data from your support help desk. Look for real volume spikes, not just stories about “that one time someone needed help at 2 AM.”
The data will show you if you truly have global demand or just occasional outliers.
Check your current pain points
Are you already paying overtime for after-hours coverage? Is your team burning out from on-call rotations or staying late to hit SLAs? If so, follow-the-sun might actually save money while making everyone’s life better.
Also, take a look at what your competitors are doing. If they’re responding faster across time zones, your customers probably notice.
How the Follow-the-Sun Support Model Works in Zendesk
You can set up a stable relay in Zendesk for a follow-the-sun model with a few deliberate choices. This will need to include groups, hours, routing, views, notes, and reporting.
You’ll need to adjust this for your organization, but let’s run through the core steps needed here:
- Create one group per region and set business hours for each group. That allows fair SLA timers and accurate reporting.
- Build routing rules that send new work to the right group based on the time of day, requester language, brand, and priority. Add a fallback rule so tickets never sit with an offline team.
- Keep views strict. Each region should have a “now” view that shows only what matters during the current shift and a second view that surfaces handoffs that are waiting for the next action.
- Standardize macros and add a few internal fields to each update. Who touched it last, what happens next, when it should happen, and whether escalation is required.
- Keep dashboards focused on what proves an efficient flow. SLA by group. Tickets stuck beyond a reasonable window, and handoff count per ticket.
- Check permissions. If groups cannot see each other’s tickets for escalations and handoffs, work stops and customers feel it.
Once you’ve set this up, test the system rigorously. The order of your Zendesk triggers can break time-aware routing if a general rule fires before a regional rule.
Business hour settings can create false SLA breaches if holidays or vacations are missing. Overly broad views invite cherry picking and leave the hard work buried.
Testing will help uncover these issues before they become real problems. If you encounter any of them, some solutions are to reorder triggers, check calendars, tighten views, and add a safety net that reassigns anything idle for two hours during another region’s business day.
Follow-the-sun Support Means Great Experiences (for everyone)
When you’re weighing speedy customer responses against team well-being and longevity, you shouldn’t have to choose. The follow-the-sun support model proves you can have both – happy customers and a happy support team.
But success isn’t automatic. The follow-the-sun model works best when three key elements are in place: seamless handoffs between regions, clear ownership of customer issues, and standardized processes that ensure consistent quality everywhere. Without these foundations, you risk creating more problems than you solve.
While it can take some work to build and implement this model, the investment pays off quickly. You’ll see faster resolution times, higher customer satisfaction scores, easier SLA compliance, and lower employee turnover. Plus, having a genuine global presence makes expanding into new markets much smoother.
Done right, follow-the-sun support doesn’t just improve your metrics—it fundamentally changes how your business operates. You move from managing coverage gaps to leveraging global talent, from stretching resources thin to building sustainable growth.
That’s the kind of advantage that compounds over time, benefiting customers, employees, and your bottom line for years to come.
Written by Mark Sherwood
Mark Sherwood is a CX strategist and support operations leader who helps teams scale without burning out or losing quality. He’s worked with SaaS and ecommerce companies to build sustainable systems, improve self-service, and streamline support workflows. Through SherwoodCX.com and consulting, he shares practical strategies for modern CX teams who want to grow the right way.
