It is easy to set up your working hours in chat and let your users know your team’s availability and when they can expect a response from your team. When a user initiates a conversation in chat, outside your working hours you can send an Offline Message letting them know that your team is offline.
As a company, you might have different teams working across regions and across international time zones. In chat, you can set up different working hours for your various teams by creating multiple Business Hours for Chat and tagging it to Groups.
How to set up Business Hours for Chat
Go to Admin Settings > Account Settings > Business Hours
You can have either one Global Business hour for all your teams or multiple Business Hours for Chat for your different teams (Groups).
Note that there is no option to add Groups in Global Business Hour setting on the left, in the below screen.
You can also set up multiple working hours for each day considering your team’s lunchtime or break hours. The gap between two working hour slots will be considered a break. And the Away message will be sent to any user during these breaks as well as out of office hours.
You can add a new Business Hour by clicking Add Business Hour.
Give your Business Hour a name, pick a time zone, enter your Away Message, and select the groups for which you want this Business Hour to be applicable. Finally, set the time intervals for each day of the week.
Some important pointers
You can add more than one Group for every Business Hour that you create. But every Group in chat can be associated with only one Business Hour. That is, if you have a Group ‘US Sales’ and you have mapped it to a Business Hour called ‘US Teams’, you cannot map it to another Business Hour in parallel.
You can create Chat Assignment Rules based on Default as well as Group Business Hour settings.
The Response Expectations that you set in your Account Settings always takes precedence over Business Hours for Chat settings.