Chat Availability Settings Should Apply to the Bot
I set my chat settings so that the chat launcher will hide outside of our business hours. Since I'm using a bot to greet and capture the name & email address of the person wishing to chat - my chat availability settings are being ignored. So I'm getting incoming chats when my sales reps aren't available. I'd like for the bot to hide outside of business hours, just like the chat launcher would IF I wans't using a bot.
Hey Everyone, we just rolled out something that should allow you to set specific office hours at the inbox level for your team, ensuring your chatbots won’t be forwarding live chats to agents who have gone home for the day:
Display chatbots based on team availability (always on, only on during business hours, or based on the availability status of team members)
Use if/then branches to route visitors based on team availability
Go here for more details on how to use these new capabilities
My name is Jesse and I'm part of the product team here at HubSpot. We've recently opened up a beta to address these issues. You can create bots that truly respect their teams working styles—whether that means creating chatflows that display when their team is online, when their team is away, or conditionally based on specific agent availability. With this beta, you can now:
Show a chatflow based on availability
Use new a if/then branch type called “agent availability”
Handoff bots to agents based on availability
How it works:
1. Showing a chatflow based on availability: Not all of our users want their chatflows live on their site all the time. With this new control, they’ll be able to create chatflows that respect their team’s availability schedule.
2. New if/then branch type called “agent availability”: When creating or editing a chatflow, users can now route their visitors down different paths based on their agent & team’s availability using the “agent availability” if/then branch type.
3. Bots handoff to agents based on availability: We’ve improved how we handle routing based on availability—taking into account first the team’s general availability settings, and then looking at individual agent availability. This will result in less chats being missed because of confusion around availability controls.
For example, if you have “During business hours” selected for your team’s inbox availability, and a customer interacts with a bot outside of those business hours, they will not be routed to agents, and instead routed to the “Unassigned” pool in your inbox so that your team doesn’t lose critical conversations.
This is huge because we are getting tons of messages over the weekend, with no one to answer them. So instead, we have to manually turn the bot off and on every single day. I hope this gets fixed soon!
I have a couple suggestions for the chat bot that I think would make life a little easier.
1. Chat bots should not have to be hosted by a welcome message. They should stand alone and be activated from the bot builder tool without connecting it to a message.
2. Give us display/targeting options for the bot. As of now, when a chat bot feature is activated, it will display at all times even if the message where the bot is hosted is set during business hours only.
^^ Yes please! We have several pages that rank internationally so we get all sorts of chats deep in the night where nobody can answer. Also have to resort to turning the bot on/off.
This has been a continual headache for us as well. Our only solution is to have sales staff manually set themselves as away when they leave for the day. Sometimes they forget and we will have chats rolling in when we are closed with response causing a bad customer experience. What ideally should happen is in the handoff configuration there should be an option to input business hours and if it falls outside those hours a message will display, similar to what can be inputted when away.
I strongly agree with the idea and already upvoted it.
I think the easiest way would be to have at least the possibility to set the timing for the targeted messages.
In this way we could:
Set up different targeted messages connected to different bots based upon office hours / out-of-office hours, so that for example we can have 1 bot with a specific flow that foresees an agent handoff if needed and 1 bot with another flow, without an agent handoff at the end but collecting the visitor's data so that we can contact him/her later (this is what I would personally need)
Set up a targeted message only for out-of-office hours so that it's connected to the bot, while during office hours the agents immediately enter the chat
Would this idea fit everyone's needs?
In this case I don't think it should be too difficult for HubSpot to release this feature, we can already target the pages where we want the targeted message to be shown, so only a "timing" rule should be added...
I would love more targeting options! Especially if I could track if certain users have used the ChatBot before, then I could load a different version of the bot without an explanation/introduction message. Or, we could prevent the ChatBot from greeting customers who have preferred to only talk to staff.
Our team has also been affected by the limitations to set away messages outside of business hours. We use the bot to guide our users through different service options while also providing the option to chat with our team if needed. Since our business is international, we have visitors looking to chat with our team outside of our business hours, which is certainly not a positive experience for them. It would be ideal if Hubspot enabled us to set away messages outside of business hours in the Agent Handoff settings so that visitors know why our team is unavailable.
Looking forward to seeing this new feature added soon.
In the meantime though, to get the chatbot showing only during office hours, install the chat snippet code with Google Tag Manager and set a Custom Tag Firing Schedule.
We are experiencing the same issue. Because the bot trumps the after hours message it moves users that chatted in earlier in the day to Unassigned with no response if they chat back in outside business hours. We need this fixed asap!
Why is there an option to "Hide chat launcher" when "all team members are 'away' or at capacity" or when it's outside business hours if it doesn't actually hide the chat launcher? What's the point of business hours then?
you are my people! exactly that - need to turn off the bot overnight otherwise we get lots of wierdos pointing me to **bleep** sites or asking bizare questions. I'm using the bot to ask for name and email whilst we are online which seems to be a common thread in this thread.
Upvoted, and seconded. Definitely need this feature ASAP, please. As has been mentioned, it's not great having the office hours setting being overridden by the bot. Thanks in advance for developing/implementing. 🙂
Agreed -- this seems straightforward, highly useful... Hubspot is an 'automation' tool, so we shouldn't have to manually toggle on/off switch regarding availability.
On a related note:
If the chat session has already been initiated, but the rep stepped away (e.g. went to bathrm, picked up a phone call, etc.) and is not answering the chat request in a timely manner, then there should be some fallbacks in place.
e.g.. If rep does not respond in x seconds (or mins), then: a) transfer to next available rep, or b) show error message.
So some sort of "inactivity timer" where after that period of time, some action happens so the visitor does not hear crickets or feel ghosted.
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