After-hours auto-replies that don't annoy people

A Business Hours Check is a step that splits your flow in two based on a weekly opening schedule: one path runs when you are open, the other when you are closed. It handles overnight hours and public holidays, and it uses your organisation's timezone unless you set a different one.

This is the second automation most stores should build, after stopping the bot when a human replies. It takes ten minutes and removes the "is anyone there?" follow-up message that otherwise arrives twenty minutes after every late-night enquiry.

Build it

1. New automation, trigger Customer Message Received.
2. Add a Pause Before Repeating step set to about 360 minutes, so a customer sending four messages at midnight gets one reply rather than four.
3. Add a Business Hours Check. Fill in each day's real open and close times, mark your closed days, and add public holidays.
4. On the open path, add End Automation. During working hours this flow should do nothing at all.
5. On the closed path, add a Send WhatsApp Message with your out-of-office text.
6. After it, add Update Conversation Status set to pending, so the chat sits in a queue your team can work through in the morning.

The two mistakes

Mistake one: no cooldown. Without the Pause Before Repeating step, every message a customer sends triggers another out-of-office reply. Someone who types three short sentences gets told three times that you are closed. This reads as broken, and it is the most common complaint about out-of-office automations.

Mistake two: not saying when you reopen. "We're currently closed" tells the customer nothing they did not already infer from the silence. "We're back at 9am tomorrow" ends the conversation satisfactorily.

Business Hours or Time of Day?

They are often both useful in the same store but rarely in the same flow. A same-day dispatch cutoff is a Time of Day question — covered in answering delivery questions automatically.

Write the message properly

Four things belong in it, and nothing else:

1. That you have received the message.
2. When you will reply — a real time, not "as soon as possible".
3. What they can do meanwhile, if anything (track an order, read a policy).
4. Nothing promotional. This message goes out at 2am to someone who may be annoyed; an offer here is how you get blocked.

Two or three lines. Long out-of-office messages read as an attempt to avoid answering.

Getting the timezone right

The check uses your organisation's timezone by default, which is what you want if you and your customers are in one place. If you sell across timezones, the schedule still describes your working hours — the customer's local time does not change when your team is at their desks. Saying "we're back at 9am UK time" is more useful than pretending otherwise.

What it will not do

The check answers "are we open right now?" for a message arriving right now. It cannot schedule a message for the moment you reopen — there is no per-contact scheduled send. If you want to greet overnight enquiries at 9am, the practical answer is a person working the pending queue, not an automation.

Doing more with the closed path

Once you have the branch, the closed path is a good place for self-service, since these are exactly the customers who would otherwise wait until morning. A menu offering order tracking or a link to your returns policy resolves a share of them without anyone waking up. Add it after the out-of-office message using an Ask Customer a Question step.

Keep the option to reach a human on that menu regardless. Someone messaging at midnight about a wrong delivery does not want a menu, and a flow with no exit is worse than no flow.