Office hours and response times

Let visitors know about your expected response times for when you are online (active) and away.

The online and away response estimates will appear in the talk widget homepage and in conversation auto-replies (depending on your away/online status).

The settings you configure on this page can be previewed at Settings > Talk Messenger in the messenger widget preview.

Example Talk widget preview shown at Settings > Talk Messenger

NOTE: You can set custom office hours for each team at Settings > Inbox > Teams and members.

Default office hours

The default office hours you set determine when your organization will be shown as “Online”.

If you have teams set up, the default team's office hours will be used by the Talk messenger widget to tell visitors when you are online. Without teams, the default office hours will be used.

Once a conversation has started and you have teams, the conversation will be assigned to the relevant team. At this point, the assigned team's office hours will be used to show the team's status and expected response time (if set). If you don't have teams, the default office hours and response times will be used.

NOTE: If you do not add any default office hours, when one of your agents has their status set to Active, you’ll be shown as online.

Example showing no office hours configured

Add office hours

At Office hours, click Add hours to set beginning and ending times for weekdays, weekends, and/or individual days.

If needed, remove office hours by clicking the trash icon.

At Timezone, set the timezone for which you want the office hours to apply.

Example default office hours configuration

NOTE: When you set default office hours, your organization will always be shown as "online" during these hours. This means that even if all your agents have their status as "Away", your organization will still appear to be online (and available to answer customer queries).

Example office hours showing as online even when all agents are "Away"

Agent status after inactivity

You can determine how an agent’s status is displayed during office hours.

Select the relevant option to:

Automatically set agents as “Away” after a set period of inactivity.
Don’t automatically set agents as “Away” during office hours.

With either option, agents can of course set their own status manually at any time.

If you choose Don’t automatically set agents as away during office hours and you have no office hours set, an agent may potentially be shown as “Online” when they have been away for a long period of time. This may result in a bad experience for your customers, where they expect a timely response from an agent who is displayed as “Online”.

Default online response time

When you’re shown as “Online”, there will be an accompanying message that tells customers when they can expect a response.

Select one of the following options:

A few minutes
A few hours
A day
Don’t commit to a time

Default away response time

If you have added office hours at Default office hours, then the options to select a default away response time will be unavailable. This is because we use the office hours to tell customers when you will be online next. For example, a person who wants to start a conversation outside your office hours will see this type of message:

If you have no office hours set, you will be able to select one of the following options:

A few hours
A day
2 business days
Don’t commit to a time.