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Office Hours

Your team isn’t online 24/7, and that’s fine. Set your office hours and BestChatBot fits human handoff around them. Inside your hours, a visitor connects to an operator live. Outside them, the same request becomes an async ticket and the visitor gets an email when your team replies. The bot keeps answering while they wait, so no one stares at a blank screen.
Setting office hours doesn’t depend on your plan. Any member with an Editor role or higher can set them. Live handoff itself works on every plan, since you’re a reserved operator by default. See Human Handoff.

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Setting Your Hours

Open Web Widget → Availability. By default the schedule is off and operators show as available around the clock. Turn on Use an availability schedule to limit live support to set hours.
Availability tab with the schedule toggle, workspace timezone, and weekly hours editor
Two settings do the work:
  • Workspace timezone sets the clock your hours run on, not the visitor’s and not your browser’s. Point it at wherever your team works, like Europe/Madrid.
  • Weekly schedule takes one or more time ranges per day. A day with no ranges stays closed. Ranges use 24-hour time and can’t cross midnight.
Turn the schedule on but leave every day empty, and operators show as offline all week. Email then answers every request. Add at least one range, or turn the schedule off for 24/7 live support.

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What Visitors See

The Talk to a human button looks the same inside and outside your hours. Only what happens on tap changes. It disappears just once: when no one on your team is set as an operator, so there’s nobody to reach.
  • Inside your hours, the conversation connects live. The visitor reads “Connecting you with our team. Someone will be with you shortly.” and your operators get a ping.
  • Outside your hours, the request opens an async ticket. The visitor reads “We’re outside our support hours right now. We’ll email you when we reply.” An anonymous visitor also gets a short form to leave an email, so you can reach them.

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The Waiting Ticket

An after-hours request, or a live request nobody grabs in time, becomes a waiting ticket. It’s a real, open handoff:
  • Any operator can claim and answer it later, from the dashboard, Slack, or Discord.
  • The bot keeps answering the visitor while it sits, so they’re never stuck.
  • It stays open for up to 30 days. If nobody ever picks it up, it quietly goes back to the bot.
In your dashboard live inbox, these show a Waiting status next to your live conversations.

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Emailing the Visitor

Email is how a visitor avoids sitting and waiting. BestChatBot emails the visitor in two cases. Here’s each one:
  • They reach you after hours. A “We got your message” email confirms your team will follow up. BestChatBot sends it only to visitors whose email is verified through signed identity, never to an address typed into the chat. We built that guard on purpose, to stop misuse.
  • You reply and they’ve already left. If the visitor closed the chat, BestChatBot emails your reply as “You have a new reply from support” with a preview. It caps at one email per conversation every 15 minutes.
Every visitor email accepts a reply. The visitor answers the email and their message lands right back in the conversation, so the thread keeps going after they close the widget.
Visitor emails are best-effort. If delivery fails, the handoff still works, the visitor just misses that one notification. A visitor who never shares an email stays in the widget only.

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Next Steps

Human Handoff

How live chat and operator seats work in the dashboard.

Pricing Plans

See what each plan includes, from dashboard handoff to Slack and Discord.