Learn to set team out-of-hours and let your visitors know when you're not online.
Overview
If you're a smaller team, you can't be online all the time. By setting your Chat team’s out-of-hours, you can hide the chat widget from your site or automatically reply to any incoming chats to let your visitors know you're offline.
Before you start
Things you need to know:
- You must be a Chat admin to set the team out-of-hours.
To learn more, check out the article Roles and permissions of Chat
Watch the video
Set your team out-of-hours
To set your team out-of-hours:
- Go to Chat > Settings.
- Select your team name tab.
- Under Out-of-hours > Enable Out-of-hours, expand the drop-down menu and select one of the following:
- Never
When Never is enabled, the Out-of-hours setting is disabled and the chat widget is always shown on your site.
This is useful if you’re a large team and always have agents online.
- Outside team working hours
Setting Outside team working hours enables the Out-of-hours setting outside of your teams working hours.
This is a good setting if you have agents available to cover each other during breaks within working hours.
- Never
- Expand the Timezone drop-down menu, and select the timezone of your team.
- Select + New time, to enter your team working hours. Expand the time-based drop-down menus to select the day, from time, and to time.
- To enter multiple days and times, select + New time again.
- Select Save.
When no agents are online
This is the most flexible setting, it will enable Out-of-hours when none of your chat team’s agents are online.
This setting is useful if you have a small team and cannot guarantee an agent will always be available for visitors during working hours.
A chat agent is considered unavailable if:
- They are logged out of their account.
- They do not have the main chat page open.
- They have set their status to away.
Out-of-hours message
If you have selected Outside team working hours or When no agents are online, you can choose what happens to the chat widget on your site during out-of-hours:
- Hide chat - The chat widget automatically hides from your site when out-of-hours is active.
- Show chat - The chat widget shows on your site when out-of-hours is active and sends an automated message to your visitors, edit the message using the out-of-hours message text box.