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Business hours

Set a weekly schedule in the chatbot's own timezone, and see exactly what changes for a visitor outside those hours.

Business hours tell visitors when a human is around. They are set per chatbot, not per workspace, so a sales bot and a support bot can keep different hours.

Open the chatbot and choose Business hours. Owners and admins can edit them; everyone else sees them read-only.

The schedule model

  • Enabled — off by default. While off, the chatbot is always treated as

    open.

  • Timezone — one IANA timezone (for example Europe/London), stored on the

    chatbot. Hours are evaluated in this timezone, never the visitor's and never the browser's, so the answer is the same for everyone.

  • Schedule — one optional open/close slot per weekday, each in 24-hour

    HH:MM form. A day with no slot is closed all day.

  • Away message — up to 500 characters, shown to visitors outside hours.

Slots that need care

SlotResult
09:00–17:00Open between those times.
22:00–06:00An overnight window. It wraps past midnight into the next morning.
00:00–23:59Open all day.
00:00–00:00Closed all day — equal open and close times read as closed, not as 24 hours.
no slotClosed all day.
Note:

If a day's times are malformed, the chatbot fails open for that day rather than silently going away — a broken row never takes your chatbot offline.

What changes outside hours

Being outside business hours does not switch the AI off. Concretely:

  • The widget's status line reads "Away — we'll follow up" instead of

    "Online".

  • A note is shown at the start of the chat: your away message, or the default

    "Our team is away right now, but I can still help — ask me anything."

  • The AI still answers every question from your knowledge base.
  • Lead capture still runs. Off-hours is exactly when an async follow-up matters,

    so a pre-chat lead form is not skipped. See Lead capture settings.

  • Handoff requests are still recorded and appear in the

    Inbox for your team in the morning.

To stop a chatbot answering entirely, set its status to inactive instead — see Create a chatbot.

Note:

The widget reads the open/closed flag from a config response cached for up to 60 seconds, so the status line can lag your schedule by about a minute. Saving settings clears the cache immediately.

Where to go next

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