Working Hours for Conversation AI Agents

Overview

We're introducing Working Hours for Conversation AI, giving business more control over when their AI agents respond to customers.

You can now set specific working days and hours for each agent, choose which channels should follow those hours, and configure what happens when a customer reaches out after business hours.

This helps business keep their AI aligned with their actual operating hours while still making sure after-hours customers are acknowledged and followed up with.

What's New?

1. Set flexible Working Hours for each agent - Choose the days and times when an AI agent should actively respond. You can set different hours for each day and add multiple time slots for breaks or split shifts.
2. Choose which channels follow Working Hours - Apply the schedule only to selected channels such as SMS, Email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Chat Widget, Live Chat, and TikTok. Channels that are not selected can continue responding 24/7.
3. Use Contact or Business Timezone - Run the schedule based on each contact's local timezone or your business timezone.
4. Continue ongoing conversations after hours - If a conversation started during working hours, the agent can continue replying after closing time until the conversation becomes inactive.
5. Send an Off-Hours Auto-Reply - Automatically acknowledge customers who message outside working hours. You can add your own custom message and personalize it using supported custom values.
6. Notify your team about after-hours messages - Send email notifications to admins, users, assigned users, selected team members, or custom email addresses.
7. Automatically tag after-hours contacts - Add selected tags to contacts who message outside business hours, making it easier to identify, filter, and follow up with them.
8. Follow up when business hours resume - Automatically send a follow-up when the business reopens if the customer has not already received a response from the agent or a team member.

Additional Notes:

• Working Hours is optional. If it is not enabled, the agent continues responding at any time as it does today.
• Working Hours applies only to the channels you select. Other channels continue working normally.
• The Off-Hours Auto-Reply, notifications, and contact tags are triggered once per closed period, so customers will not receive the same acknowledgement for every message they send after hours.
• The business-hours follow-up is skipped if the customer has already received a response from either the AI agent or a team member.
• In Suggestive Mode, suggestions can still be generated after working hours for your team.
• If Followup Hours is also configured for Advanced Follow-Up, the agent's Working Hours takes priority for the channels included in the agent's schedule.
• Agents can still be manually activated outside their Working Hours when needed via conversation panel.
• Working Hours is configured per agent, so different agents can have completely different schedules.