Office Hours and Offline Auto-Reply in Five Steps

You don't need 24/7 support. You do need visitors to know when you'll actually answer. A three-line offline message plus a business-hours schedule is the difference between "I'll wait" and "I'll try a competitor." Five steps.

Step 1: Open the office-hours settings

Console → Settings → Office hours. This covers the whole workspace by default; if you use groups, each group can override with its own hours. First time in, defaults are weekday 9–18.

Step 2: Pick timezone and weekly windows

Timezone first. A US East team picks America/New_York. Pacific team, America/Los_Angeles. Getting this wrong silently shifts every other setting, so get it right here.

Then configure weekly windows. Multiple ranges per day are fine, example:

• Mon–Fri 09:00–12:30 and 13:30–18:00
• Sat 10:00–14:00
• Sun closed

Lunch break? Just configure two ranges — the gap counts as offline.

Step 3: Write the offline message

Settings → Auto-reply → Offline message. Write two versions:

• First hit: tell the visitor you're offline, when you'll be back (use {{next_open}} — it auto-fills), and your typical response time.
• Repeat hit: if the same conversation sends again during offline hours, don't repeat the long version. Short form: "Got it. Back to you at 9 a.m. tomorrow."

Step 4: Add language variants

If you support multiple languages, write each template in every language you handle. Lane.Chat picks by visitor locale automatically — English browsers get English, Japanese browsers get Japanese, fallback if no match.

Step 5: Test it

Two ways:

• Edit schedule: temporarily mark today as closed all day, send a test message from the widget, confirm you get the offline reply. Then put the real hours back — easy to forget this and accidentally close for real.
• Message after hours: wait until after your real closing time, ping from a test account, verify {{next_open}} filled in correctly and the response-time line reads well.

One common gotcha: DST transitions. The week clocks change, do a quick sanity check — the wrong timezone here means every visitor sees wrong hours for months before you notice.

截图清单 / Screenshots Checklist

• 01-office-hours-entry.png — Settings menu with office hours entry and current status
• 02-weekly-schedule.png — Weekly schedule editor with multi-range days and a closed day
• 03-offline-template.png — Offline message editor with placeholder and preview pane