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Working hours and auto-replies: greeting and out-of-hours message

A customer writes at 23:40 and the team starts at 9:00 — silence reads as "they're out of business". Set the company's working hours and two auto-replies: a greeting at the start of a conversation and an out-of-hours message. Here's how working hours are calculated, which auto-reply wins, and why it arrives once rather than after every message.

What you need to know

  • Auto-replies are a company setting, not an automation: they work across every channel at once and require no scenario to be built.
  • There are two: a welcome message (at the start of a new conversation) and an out-of-hours message. Both are off by default.
  • Working hours are set once in company settings and are not used by the auto-reply alone — other processes that care whether you are open read the same schedule.

Step 1. Set the working hours

Open Settings → Company → Working hours. Each weekday has a switch plus a start and an end time; a switched-off day is marked "Day off". The top right shows how many days a week are working.

Times are evaluated in the company's timezone, not the operator's or the customer's. If the team works from several cities, the company timezone should be the one you promise response times in.

A day with no schedule row at all counts as non-working, exactly like an explicit day off. That is convenient: to make Saturday non-working, simply leave it empty.

There is also a list of exceptions — holidays and non-working days with a date and a label. They apply only when "Respect holidays" is on: with it, a listed date becomes non-working entirely, regardless of the weekly schedule.

The Working hours screen: per-weekday switches with start and end times
Settings → Company → Working hours. Saturday and Sunday are switched off and marked as days off.

Step 2. Turn the auto-replies on

Both auto-replies live in Settings → Message automation → Channel auto-replies: that is where the "Welcome message" and "Outside working hours" switches and their texts are.

The Channel auto-replies screen with the welcome and out-of-hours switches
Settings → Message automation → Channel auto-replies. Per-channel greeting overrides sit below.
Both auto-replies work in one-to-one conversations only and are never sent to group chats — the banner on the page says the same.
Auto-replyWhen it is sent
Welcome messageOnly at the start of a new conversation, during working hours. It does not repeat on later messages in the same conversation.
Out-of-hours messageWhen an inbound message arrives outside the schedule — including in an ongoing conversation, not only a new one.
If the first message of a conversation arrives outside working hours, only the out-of-hours message is sent: it takes priority over the greeting so the customer never gets two auto-replies in a row.

The out-of-hours message reaches the customer once, not after every message they send at night: a repeat in the same conversation is suppressed until the next working day begins. A customer who sends five messages at midnight gets one reply.

Different greetings per channel

The shared greeting is overridden per channel at the bottom of the same page — the "Channel greeting overrides" block. The on/off state is inherited from the global setting: only the text is overridden.

A channel with no override falls back to the shared text. The out-of-hours message has no per-channel overrides — there is one per company.

What to write

  • In the out-of-hours message name the response time, not the absence: "We are online 9:00 to 18:00 on weekdays and will reply in the morning" beats "We are away right now".
  • In the greeting, ask for whatever speeds up the operator's first reply — an order number, a city, the gist of the question.
  • Do not promise what you cannot keep: "we reply within 5 minutes" at night reads as a lie if the team starts at 9:00.

Common issues

SymptomCause and what to do
No auto-reply arrives at allCheck that the matching switch is on in Chat behaviour and the text is not empty: an empty text silently skips the send.
At night the greeting arrives instead of the out-of-hours messageThe out-of-hours message is off, so the greeting takes over. Turn it on — it has priority.
The "we are offline" message arrives during the dayThe weekday has no schedule row, or the date is in the exceptions list while "Respect holidays" is on. Check the company timezone too.
The customer writes several times at night but gets one auto-replyThat is by design: a repeat in the same conversation is suppressed until the next working day starts, to avoid spamming.

See also

If you need a conditional scenario rather than a company-wide auto-reply — tags, assignment, deal creation — see Automations: everyday scenarios. Who picks the conversation up after the auto-reply is covered in Conversation assignment.