In this article, you'll learn how to set up business hours for live agent support in your bot.
The business hours feature lets you define your live agent support hours for the different days of the week.
Set up business hours and queue business hours from the same menu.
To configure live agent support hours, go to Menu > Settings > Manual Chat. There you'll find "Business hours" and "Queue business hours" unified in a single menu. This way, you can have the bot route conversations to agents only within those hours.
We also recommend writing a message (tied to the "outside business hours" = false condition) so that users who reach out outside of business hours receive that notification.
Likewise, you can set custom hours for queues by clicking "+ New schedule" to apply them only to the segments you want. These schedules are displayed on the left side of the schedule screen.
This lets you set the days when live agent support won't be available — for example, special dates and holidays. You can add the "days without service" you want by clicking the month/day/year box and then clicking "+". And remember that you can set days without service for each support queue that has been created, according to its respective schedule.
When this feature is enabled, it overrides all of the settings above. This way, you'll always be within live agent support hours, and the bot will try to route the user to an agent if they request one.
Business Hours.
Business hours work with the "isOpenNow" variable (displayed as "Within business hours"), which takes a true value when you're within business hours and a false value when you're outside of them. This lets us condition the bot's behavior based on the time using these two values. Let's look at the following example:
Keep in mind that to assign this feature to your bot, you need to use conditions and define the true and false paths for each item.
If true:
If false:
Queue business hours work the same way as business hours. The only difference is that, instead of using the "isOpenNow" variable, they use a variable generated when you create the schedule. This variable will have the same name you assigned to the schedule. Below, let's look at an example with the queue and schedule for the finance department:
You can change your out-of-hours message or add new conditions using platform variables.
So it will understand that if it's the 12th, 13th, or 14th and outside of business hours, it can display a specific message for Carnival.
Holiday message
This simplified setup will make it easier to manage your conversations and, therefore, to run your project.