Set your default office hours

Set your default office hours in the Messenger so your customers know when you're out of office.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

If a customer gets in touch outside of your default office hours, the Messenger will let them know when your team will be back in the office. This keeps customers informed and sets expectations for when they will receive a response.

Set office hours 

Your default office hours are automatically set to weekdays from 9am to 5pm based on your local timezone.

Select + Add hours to set different hours for days of the week when you're in the office.

Note:

  • The weekdays option is Monday - Friday and weekends is Saturday - Sunday.

  • Office hours are automatically adjusted for daylight savings.

  • We use these office hours to calculate your automatic reply time.

Outside of office hours, the Messenger will display when your team will be back online.

Note:

  • Office hours are in 30 minute increments.

  • The "back in X minutes/hours" estimate will always be a round number, and rounds up.

    • So it will show your office hours as "Back in 30 minutes", even if a customer messages you 5 minutes before your office hours begin.

    • If your office hours start at 8:00 and it's 5:35, the value will show 3 hours.

    • The message changes from "in x hours" to "later" if the estimate would be 4+ hours.

When a customer opens the Messenger outside of office hours, they’ll see when your team will be back online. 

For example, if you’ve selected "Weekdays" as your office hours and a customer opens the Messenger during the weekend, we’ll let them know you’ll be back on Monday.

Set custom office hours for teams with different operating hours

When you set your default office hours this is a global setting based on your workspace's local timezone. So if you have teams operating in different timezones, they will use the default office hours from your local timezone, unless you set custom office hours for each team.

For example, if your workspace's local timezone is Los Angeles (Pacific Time) and you have a support team in New York, you can add custom office hours from 6am-2pm Los Angeles time (that's 9am-5pm in New York).

Learn how to add custom office hours for your teams.

Let customers help themselves 

If you have Articles, you can use the Article Search app to let your customers help themselves while you're out of office.


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