Office hours tell the assistant when your team is available. They decide who answers first, whether calls can be transferred and which greeting callers hear. You set them in the Hours & answering tab of each assistant.
Phone assistant hours
On a phone assistant, office hours belong to the team number the assistant transfers to:
- Go to Assistants, click Configure on your phone assistant and open Hours & answering.
- Under Call forwarding, click Add Number, or the pencil icon on the number you already have.
- In Business hours, tick each day your team works. A new day starts as 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM; change the start and end times as needed.
- Need a lunch break or split shift? Click Add Block to add a second time range that day, or Remove Block to delete one.
- Click Save.
The hours use your assistant's time zone, which Edenia sets when we connect your line. To change it, contact us.
If the times don't make sense you'll see a message: "Opening time must be before closing time", "Time intervals cannot overlap" or "Select at least one day".
What changes outside office hours
- The assistant always answers, even if your team normally answers first.
- No live transfers. If the caller asks for a person, the assistant says the team isn't available right now and offers a ticket instead (when ticket creation is set up).
- Callers hear the Out of Hours Message, if you wrote one. See Greeting and voice.
- The assistant doesn't announce that you're closed straight away; it helps first.
At any time, if a caller asks for your hours, the assistant tells them the hours you set here.
WhatsApp assistant hours
A WhatsApp assistant can use the phone hours or its own:
- Open the WhatsApp assistant and go to Hours & answering.
- Under Office hours, tick Use own hours.
- Pick the Timezone, then set days and blocks as above.
- Click Save.
If you leave Use own hours unticked, WhatsApp uses your phone assistant's hours. A note at the top of the tab tells you which hours are in use, and the phone assistant shows which WhatsApp assistants share its hours. To learn what WhatsApp does with these hours, see Who answers first on WhatsApp.
Good to know
- No team number means no phone hours. Without one, the assistant answers every call at any time and can't transfer.
- If the WhatsApp assistant has no hours of its own and there are no phone hours either, it has no office hours at all.
- Hours repeat every week. There's no holiday calendar yet; to handle a holiday, change the hours that day and set them back afterwards.
- Changes apply to new calls and messages.