⏰Set up your Business Hours

Configure the time duration of when your team is available for your customers

Introduction

In this day and age, your customers expect you to be available 24/7. But generally that can often become hard for business owners. Hence you have to make your team available for a specific time frame. When you’re not available though, what makes things worse for your customers is to not know that they’ve reached out to you at a time when you’re unavailable.

To make sure you can run your customer support team efficiently without getting your customers annoyed, we developed the Business Hours feature.

What you can do

You can configure the time and day of the week when your team is available. And you can set up offline messages for when your customers reach out to you when you’re not available.

Video Walkthrough

How to Set up Business Hours

Step 1: Login to MyAlice, go to Settings and click on Business Hours under Chat Settings.

Step 2: Turn on the Operational Status button. If your team is available 24 hours and 7 days a week, select ‘24/7 Business Hours’.

To set custom business hours, select the ‘Custom Business Hours’ button and tick the days and the times your team will be available. You can also set multiple available windows for a single day by clicking on the ‘+’ button available against each day.

Step 3: You can also set up Holidays and Day Offs as and when required.

How to Set up Offline Messages

You can add offline messages for each channel that you connect on MyAlice.

Step 1: Given that your Business Hours is set, go to Integration. Click on the options against the channel that you want to set up the offline message for and select ‘Ticket Settings’

Step 3: When you’re offline, you can either create a chatbot flow for the customers to go through. To do that, enable the ‘Do you want to turn on chatbot for this channel?’ button and set up the flow from Automations.

If chatbot automation is not something that you want to use, what you can do is set up a basic offline message for the customers and create a ticket which will come to the Inbox. To do that, disable the ‘Do you want to turn on chatbot for this channel?’ which will enable the section below. Select how you want the ticket to be assigned and set up the relevant online and offline messages.

Business Hours wise Automation

You might want to assign tickets to your agents in your business hours, and want to enable chatbot out of the business hours. Here's how you can do it.

1. Enable Chatbot in Channel Settings.

2. In Welcome Sequence / Default Sequence, create a Redirect Block. In the Block, use business_hours attribute and set that to true to set up automation or ticket assignment in business hours. Set the value to false to set up automation out of business hours.

Setting up Business Hours wise Redirect Block

Recommendations

1. Business Hours is set for each team on MyAlice. Hence if you have multiple teams, you should configure the same for each. Moreover, the business hours you set for a team applies for all the channels you connect to MyAlice and for all the members of your team.

2. Please make sure that you’re selecting your timezone from Settings> Team Information before you set up Business Hours.

3. Remember to set up the offline messages for all the channels that you’ve connected to MyAlice.