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
Office hours are not specified by default, meaning availability is set to 24/7, always-on.
You can add your office hours from Settings > Workspace > Office Hours.
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 reply times
You can also set your reply times when editing your office hours in Settings > Workspace > Office Hours.
Under Set reply times choose between:
In a few minutes
In a few hours
In a day
Set a custom time (and select the hours)
Dynamic reply time (your team’s median first reply time during office hours over the past 7 days)
Learn more about setting reply times in the Messenger.
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.
Set reply expectations
In the Messenger settings, you have the option to:
Show office hours and reply times in the Messenger.
Only show after a conversation has been assigned to a team.
Hide office hours and reply times in the Messenger.
These options give you greater flexibility to set the right expectations across teams and ensure accuracy when communicating with your customers in the Messenger.
For mobile SDKs, these options are only available on iOS versions 16.5.0 or higher and on Android versions 15.6.0 or higher.
Option 1a:
To display office hours to customers before a conversation is assigned, go to Settings > Channels > Messenger > Conversations > Reply expectations and turn on the toggle "Show reply times during office hours and indicate when the team will be back online outside office hours".
Option 1b Recommended :
To only show office hours and reply times after a conversation has been assigned to a team, go to Settings > Channels > Messenger > Conversations > Reply expectations and turn on the toggle, then select the checkbox "Show only once a conversation is assigned to a team".
This checkbox is only visible if you have teams configured.
Option 2:
To hide office hours and reply times from the Messenger entirely, go to Settings > Channels > Messenger > Conversations > Reply expectations and turn off the toggle "Show reply times during office hours and indicate when the team will be back online outside office hours".
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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