Office hours and reply times help you set expectations for your customers when they start a conversation in the Messenger, but you may have different teams online at different times, so the expectations will be different. That’s where custom office hours can help.
When the customer actually starts a conversation with you, Intercom runs the assignment rules to see which team their conversation will be assigned to, and based on the office hours you’ve set for that team, we confirm exactly when they should expect a response. Read on and find out how to set up office hours for your teams.
Create custom office hours for each of your teams
Go to Settings > Help Desk > Teams.
Then, select a team, scroll down to Choose office hours and use the dropdown to select + New office hours.
Now, enter a name for this set of office hours, the timezone, and when they’ll be in effect:
You can also create new Office Hours from Settings > Workspace > Office Hours and see how many teams are associated with existing Office Hours.
Sets of hours can be associated with more than one team, so after you create one set of hours, you can then associate it with all teams who are working during those hours. Just choose an existing set of office hours from the dropdown. 👍
Set expected reply times for each team
Below the office hours setting when viewing a team (Settings > Help Desk > Teams), you can also define the reply time for each team to ensure you set accurate expectations for your customers, no matter which team will be answering their conversation.
SLAs (service level agreements) can also be set on a per-team basis.
Manage unexpected delays
If your team experience a high volume period due to an outage, a big promotion or an external event, this can lead to longer wait times for your customers. Let them know with a special notice or by temporarily removing reply times in your Messenger.
Set office hours and reply times for your workspace
While office hours can be set per team, you can also set workspace wide office hour and expected reply times.
To change your workspace settings, head over to Settings > Workspace > Office Hours and click on the office hours to edit.
Here you can edit your office hours and set your reply times:
Any team-level office hours and reply times will override the workspace level setting. If a team does not have custom office hours or reply time set, Intercom will show your default ones you set here.
Edit and delete custom office hours
To edit a set of custom office hours, go to Settings > Workspace > Office hours.
Hover over the custom office hours you've created and click the pencil icon to update the name, the scheduled hours, or the timezone.
Or, click Delete to remove the custom office hours. If you have any teams that use these hours, they'll be updated to your default office hours.
Team office hours cannot be set in [TEST] workspaces, as team settings are inherited from your live workspace.
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