How to Integrate Business Hours in Workflow

Business hours integration allows you to create workflows that adapt based on the current date and time, ensuring customer interactions are relevant and timely. You can configure automation logic to check whether the current time falls within defined business hours, outside of them or on holidays and then execute specific actions accordingly. This feature helps manage after-hours queries, send holiday greetings and assign conversations to agents effectively.

How Business Hours Conditions Work

Business hours conditions are evaluated based on the current date and time. These conditions can be applied to supported fields such as Created or Updated. The following operators allow you to create time-based conditions within workflows:

• Business Hours

  Evaluates as true when the current date and time falls within the defined business schedule. This includes both the day of the week and the time range for that day.
  Example: If business hours are Monday to Friday, 09:00–18:00, the condition is true only during that time window.

• Non-Business Hours

  Evaluates as true when the current date and time falls outside the scheduled business hours—such as during evenings, weekends or unconfigured time slots.
  Example: 19:00 on Tuesday or 10:00 on Sunday will both trigger this condition if hours are set to 09:00–18:00.

• Holidays

  Evaluates as true for the entire day if the date is defined as a holiday in the business hours schedule.
  Example: If 2025-12-25 is a holiday, this condition is true all day.

• Before

  Evaluates as true when the current UTC date and time is before a specific date-time value.
  Example: Before 2025-06-01 03:30:00.

• After

  Evaluates as true when the current UTC date and time is after a specific date-time value.
  Example: After 2025-06-01 17:30:00.

To configure business hours for chat, navigate to the following path: Admin > Chat > Work Schedules > Business Hour. To learn how to set up business hours, click here.

Where to Use Business Hours Conditions in Your Workflow

1. Initial condition in workflow
   You can configure the business hours in the initial condition added while creating the workflow. The workflow will be executed only if this initial condition is met.
   Use case: Use this when you want to run entirely different workflows based on business hours.

2. Branch via Conditions Block
   You can also add the business hours within a Branch via Conditions block inside the workflow.
   Use case: Use this when only a specific part of the workflow should behave differently based on business hours.

How to Send Offline Messages Outside of Business Hours Using Conditional Branches

1. Navigate to Admin > Chat > Chat Automation > Workflows.
2. Create a new workflow or edit an existing one for the Conversation Created trigger.
3. Add or edit a Branch via Conditions block.
4. Add or edit a condition branch and then add a Created condition.
5. Set the operator to Business Hours, choose the appropriate schedule and save the condition block.
   
   
6. Under the else path of the business hours condition branch, add a Send Message block to deliver an offline message. Add other blocks as needed.
   
   
7. After configuring the exit block, Publish and Activate the workflow.

When a customer initiates a conversation during business hours, the workflow asks for their contact details and assigns to the support team using the round robin method. During non-business hours, the workflow sends the configured message, informing the customer to contact you during business hours.