Business Hours, Timezone and After-Hours Behaviour

The promise a chat widget makes

A visible chat widget implies someone is there. When that turns out to be untrue at 9pm, the visitor does not conclude that your hours are reasonable. They conclude that your chat does not work. The fix is not to hide the widget after hours. It is to make it behave differently and say so.

Three settings do this in Website Chat & Widget Customization: business hours, timezone, and after-hours behaviour. A fourth, the By availability step, does it inside the conversation itself.

Set the hours you actually answer

Not your opening hours. The hours someone will genuinely see and respond to a chat message. For a lot of small businesses those differ: the shop opens at 8, but nobody is watching the inbox until 9.

Being conservative here costs you nothing. A visitor who gets a fast reply during a window you marked offline is pleasantly surprised. A visitor who waits forty minutes during a window you marked online is not.

Set the timezone deliberately

The timezone applies to your hours, and it matters most when your team and your visitors are in different places. If you sell nationally from one office, your hours are your office’s hours, a visitor three timezones away should be met with an offline path that tells them when you are back, not silence.

Choose the after-hours behaviour

Configurable after-hours behaviour decides what the widget does outside your window. What you want is a state that is honest and still useful: the widget available, the messaging changed, and a route to leaving details.

Offline message intake is the part that turns an inconvenience into an enquiry. The visitor leaves what they need, it stays in retained conversation history, and it is waiting in the inbox when your team starts.

Branch the conversation, not just the appearance

Changing the widget’s appearance is half the job. The other half is the conversation. A By availability step near the top of your flow gives you two genuinely different paths.

Online: your normal greeting, the usual choices, and a real offer to reach a person.

Offline: a short honest opener, then a Form step collecting exactly what your team needs to act in the morning, then an expectation you can meet. “We’re closed until 8am, leave your details and we’ll come back to you first thing” is a sentence you can keep.

The offline path is the one most businesses under-invest in, and it is usually where the highest-intent enquiries land. Someone messaging at 10pm about a problem is not browsing.

More on this in branching by page, availability and saved answers.

Keep the two in agreement

The single most common mistake is a mismatch: the widget says offline while the flow greets people as if the team is standing by, or vice versa. Set both, then check both by loading your site outside hours and walking through it as a visitor.

The bigger off-switch

For a stretch where nobody is answering at all, a shutdown period, a migration, a week that got away from you, the live/paused site setting hides the widget entirely without touching your website code. That is a blunter instrument than after-hours behaviour and occasionally the right one.

A short checklist

• Business hours reflect when someone actually watches the inbox
• Timezone set to your team’s location
• After-hours behaviour chosen, not left at default
• Offline message intake collecting real detail, not just a name
• A By availability branch so the conversation matches the widget
• Both tested from a visitor’s point of view, out of hours

Writing the offline message

The offline message is read by people who already know nobody is there. It should respect that.

Say the actual time you are back. “We’re back at 8am” is worth more than “we’ll respond as soon as possible”, because it lets someone decide whether to wait or leave details.

Ask for what you need, not what you might want. An offline form should collect the minimum that lets your team act in the morning. This is not the moment for optional fields.

Set one expectation and keep it. If you reply to overnight enquiries before lunch, say so. Overpromising at 10pm is how a good enquiry becomes a complaint.

Skip the apology loop. One acknowledgement is enough. Repeated apology reads as evasion.

Weekends, holidays and the edge cases

Business hours cover the regular week. The awkward parts are the exceptions.

Public holidays. Nothing automatic will know about them. Either update your hours in advance or accept that the offline path handles it, which is a reasonable choice if the offline path is well written.

Shutdown periods. For a genuine closure of a week or more, the live/paused site setting is cleaner than an offline path that will be answered by nobody for ten days.

Split coverage. If mornings are covered and afternoons are not, set hours to the covered window rather than the full working day. Being conservative costs nothing; being optimistic costs a waiting visitor.

Multiple sites in different timezones. Each site carries its own hours and timezone, so set them per site rather than inheriting one from another.

Read next: how to customize your chat widget, or capture and qualify leads with conversation forms.