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Setting up business hours and availability

Last updated on Jun 05, 2026

Setting up business hours and availability

Business hours tell Konversio when your team is actively staffed. This affects auto-responses, SLA calculations, and how out-of-hours messages are handled.

Why business hours matter

Without business hours configured, Konversio treats every hour of every day as a working hour. This causes two problems:

  • SLA timers run overnight and on weekends, making your breach rates look worse than they are.
  • Customers who write at 2am receive no indication that they will get a response the next morning.

Configuring business hours fixes both.

Configuring business hours per inbox

Business hours are set at the inbox level, not account-wide. This lets different inboxes have different schedules — for example, a live chat inbox might be staffed 9–5 weekdays, while an email inbox is monitored Monday through Saturday.

To configure:

  1. Go to Settings > Inboxes.
  2. Click Settings next to the inbox you want to configure.
  3. Select the Business Hours tab.
  4. Toggle on each day your team works and set the open and close times.
  5. Set your Timezone for this inbox — this is used to interpret the hours you enter.
  6. Click Update.

You can also set the inbox as operating 24/7 if needed — toggle all days on and set hours to 00:00–24:00.

Out-of-hours messaging

On the Business Hours tab, you can configure a message that is automatically sent to customers who contact you outside your set hours. This message should:

  • Acknowledge their message arrived
  • State when they can expect a response
  • Avoid vague language like "soon" — be specific ("We'll reply the next business day")

Example:

Thanks for getting in touch. Our team is currently offline. We're available Monday–Friday, 9am–6pm CET, and will reply as soon as we're back.

Agent availability status

Individual agents can set their availability status independently of business hours. The status options are:

  • Online — available to receive conversation assignments
  • Busy — still logged in but should not receive new auto-assignments
  • Offline — will not receive auto-assignments

To change your status, click your avatar in the bottom-left corner and select a status.

Auto-assignment (when enabled) will skip agents who are set to Busy or Offline. If all agents are Busy or Offline, new conversations go into the queue unassigned.

Interaction between business hours and availability

Business hours and agent status work independently but together:

  • If it is within business hours but all agents are Offline, conversations queue up unassigned.
  • If it is outside business hours, the out-of-hours auto-reply fires regardless of whether any agents are Online.

For the most consistent customer experience, make sure agents set their status to Offline when they finish their shift rather than simply closing the browser tab.

SLAs and business hours

If you use SLA policies, ensure your SLA target times are configured with business hours in mind. An SLA of "first reply within 4 hours" means 4 business hours, not 4 clock hours, when business hours are enabled. Configure this under Settings > SLA Policies.