If a customer gets in touch outside of your office hours, Operator will let them know when your team will be back in the office. This sets your customers’ expectations for when they should expect a response. Here’s how it works:
Show your team’s office hours
By default, your office hours are set to weekdays from 9am to 5pm.
You can change your office hours in your Messenger settings. Just set your hours for any given day or for weekdays or weekends.
Important:
We use your office hours to calculate your automatic reply time. Review your office hours now to ensure your automatic reply time calculation is accurate.
Office hours are calculated based on your app’s local timezone.
If your user messages you in the 30 minutes before your office hours start, Operator will let them know you'll be back in 30 minutes. It will show your office hours as 'Back in 30 minutes', even if a user messages you five minutes before your office hours begin.
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 week, we’ll let them know you’ll be back on Monday.
Select multiple timeframes within each day
If you have multiple international teams in different timezones, you can add additional office hours that match each team’s timezone.
For example, if your app's local timezone is Los Angeles (Pacific Time) and you have a support team in New York, you can add office hours from 6am-2pm Los Angeles time (that's 9am-5pm in New York).
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.
What’s next?
Let your users know when to expect a response.
If you or a teammate are away from the office for a specific time period, you can set an 'away mode' status in Intercom and automatically reassign new conversations.