Live Chat · Business hours
Live chat business hours and after-hours cover
Tell ChatFlo your timezone and opening hours. Inside them, handoff reaches your team; outside them, the agent keeps answering and queues anything it cannot resolve.
What happens to website chat outside business hours?
The AI agent keeps answering. You set your timezone and opening hours, and outside them visitors see a message you choose instead of a handoff prompt. Anything the agent cannot resolve is queued for your team with the full conversation attached, so nobody starts from scratch in the morning.
Why it matters
Set when a human is available — the agent covers the rest.
Questions do not respect your hours
A meaningful share of website questions arrive overnight and at weekends. Without cover, those visitors get silence and usually do not come back.
Honest expectations beat false promises
Telling someone at 2am when a human will actually reply is better than an unanswered chat that implies someone is there.
Mornings start with context, not a backlog
Overnight conversations arrive already partly resolved, with the agent's replies and the customer's original question attached.
In the product
What you configure
These map to real settings in your dashboard, not a roadmap.
Timezone
Hours are evaluated in the timezone you set, not the visitor's, so the schedule matches when your team is actually at their desks.
Opening hours
Define when your team is available. Inside those hours, escalation offers a human; outside them, it does not.
Outside-hours message
The line visitors see when they arrive after close — use it to set a real expectation about when someone will reply.
Offline message
A separate message for when the agent cannot help and no human is available, so the dead end still tells the visitor what to do next.
One schedule, not many
Hours are set per chatbot in a single timezone. If you run genuinely follow-the-sun support across regional teams, this will not model that — you would need a separate chatbot per region, which also splits your inbox. Worth checking against how your team actually works before you rely on it.
Cover the hours you do not staff
Set your timezone and opening hours, and the agent takes the nights and weekends.
Frequently asked questions
No — the opposite. It keeps answering exactly as it does during the day. What changes is escalation: outside your hours it does not promise a human is standing by, and shows your outside-hours message instead.
Hours are configured in the business hours settings screen; check it against your actual schedule before you commit, particularly if your weekend cover differs from your weekdays.
They queue in the shared inbox with the full thread attached, including everything the agent already answered, so your team picks up mid-conversation rather than restarting it.
Yours, not the visitor's. The schedule reflects when your team is available, which is the thing the visitor actually needs to know.
More live chat
The rest of the widget
Every one of these is a setting on the same widget — you are not buying them separately.
Widget customization
A chat widget that looks like it was built for your site.
Learn moreMultilingual chat
One widget that answers in whatever language the visitor types.
Learn moreProactive messages
Start the conversation before the visitor decides to leave.
Learn morePre-chat form
Capture who you are talking to before the conversation starts.
Learn more