Agent shifts and out-of-hours cover
Rostered, present and available are three different things. Confusing them is why chats sit unanswered with everyone technically on duty.
A shift is one recurring weekly working window for one person. Monday 09:00 to 17:00 is a shift; so is Saturday 12:00 to 16:00. Put several together and you have a rota the assignment system can actually use.
The reason to bother is not administrative tidiness. It is that a system which knows who is working can stop giving conversations to people who are not.
Three states, frequently confused
| State | Means | Set by |
|---|---|---|
| On shift | Rostered to be working now | The weekly pattern you built |
| Present | Signed in and active | The agent, or the automatic away timer |
| Available | On shift, present, and under their chat limit | Both of the above, together |
Only the third takes automatic work. Somebody rostered but stepped away is not available, and somebody online outside their hours is not either — which is deliberate, because logging in to check something should not hand you a queue.
Split shifts
Several windows on the same weekday is a split shift: 09:00 to 13:00 and then 17:00 to 21:00. This is normal in a great many businesses and it is expressed simply as two rows on the same day.
Worth using rather than approximating with one long shift. A rota that claims someone is working through their break will keep assigning them conversations through it, and the effect on response times is exactly what you would expect.
Shifts that run past midnight
An end time earlier than the start time means the window runs into the next day — 22:00 to 02:00 is a single overnight shift rather than an error.
This matters for any business trading late, and it is the sort of thing worth testing once so you can see it behaving correctly rather than trusting it.
Holidays and one-off changes
An override is a dated exception that replaces the weekly pattern for that date. Two forms:
- Off — not working that day, whatever the pattern says.
- Custom hours — working, but different hours.
An override can apply to one person or to the whole organisation, and the organisation-wide form is how you express a public holiday. Where both exist, the personal one wins — which is what you want when one person is covering a day everyone else has off.
Time zones
Shifts are local time, resolved per organisation or per agent. If your team spans time zones, this is the setting to get right before you build the rota rather than after, because a rota that is an hour out is worse than no rota at all — it is confidently wrong.
What happens outside everyone's hours
Three things should be true, and most stores get one of them:
- An automation answers with what you can genuinely tell someone at that hour — including when you will reply.
- Conversations are not assigned to people who are asleep, unless you have deliberately chosen to stack their queue.
- The queue drains when someone signs in, in batches rather than all at once.
The messaging half of that is covered in what to do with chats overnight. The rota half is this page, and they are worth doing together.
The cost angle
Out-of-hours handling has a financial edge that is easy to miss. The 24-hour customer service window opens when the customer messages you and resets each time, per Meta's sending messages documentation, and replies inside it are free and unlimited under Meta's pricing documentation.
A message that sits until the window has closed needs an approved template to answer, per Meta's template documentation. So a rota that gets a first reply out the same day is not only better service — it is cheaper.
Setting up a rota that survives contact with reality
- Start from your actual cover, not your intended cover.
- Build the weekly pattern including split shifts.
- Add the organisation-wide holidays you already know about.
- Set an automatic away timer so somebody who forgets to sign out stops receiving work.
- Decide what happens to an away agent's open chats — handing them back is an option, and it suits some teams and not others.
Step five is worth a conversation with the team rather than a unilateral decision. Some people want their conversations kept; some would rather they moved.
Frequently asked
Do I need shifts if we are all on the same hours?
Not strictly, but they still stop assignment happening overnight, which is the main benefit for a small team.
What if someone works irregular hours?
Dated overrides handle the exceptions. If every week is different, manual assignment may fit better than a rota.
Does the customer see any of this?
No. They see how fast you reply and what your after-hours message says.
What is the away timer for?
Marking someone away automatically after a period of inactivity, so an open browser tab does not count as a person at their desk. Assignment respects it — see assigning chats to the right agent.
A rota for a small team, worked through
Say you have 3 people and you want cover from 09:00 to 21:00, seven days. The naive version is three long shifts and a lot of goodwill. The workable version uses split shifts and overrides:
| Person | Pattern | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A | Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00 | The core weekday cover |
| B | Mon–Fri 13:00–21:00 | Overlaps A for four hours — deliberate |
| C | Sat–Sun 09:00–13:00 and 17:00–21:00 | A split shift, which is what weekends usually need |
The overlap in the middle of the day is not waste. It is what absorbs the busiest period, and it is the part people cut first when they build a rota from availability rather than from demand.
Build the rota from your own message volume
- Look at when messages actually arrive, by hour and by day, over a full month.
- Find the two or three peaks. Most stores have an evening one they had not registered.
- Put your overlap there, not in the middle of the working day.
- Cover the edges thinly rather than not at all — one person at 20:00 beats an automated apology.
- Recheck quarterly, because the pattern moves with your marketing.
This is the step that converts a rota from a fairness exercise into an operational one, and it takes an hour with your own data.
What to tell customers about your hours
Be specific and be honest. "We reply within a few hours during business hours" sets an expectation you can meet; "we reply immediately" does not survive a Sunday.
The message that lands outside your hours should say three things: that you have received it, when somebody will look, and anything the automation can answer in the meantime. That last part is where most of the value is — a customer whose question was answered at 23:00 does not care that nobody was working.
Presence, and being honest about it
The away state exists so people can be on shift and momentarily unavailable without conversations piling up on them. It works only if the team actually uses it, which is a culture question more than a settings one.
The automatic timer is the backstop for the days when nobody remembers. Set it to a period that reflects how you work — long enough that reading a long message does not mark you away, short enough that a lunch break does.
When one person is the whole team
A rota still helps, and for a different reason: it stops the system behaving as though you are available at 2am simply because you have not signed out.
Set your real hours, let the automation handle the rest, and use the away state deliberately when you step out. It is also the honest input to the after-hours message — a one-person business that says "I reply in the morning" is setting an expectation it can keep, and the flows that carry that message are in business hours and after-hours automation.
Growing past the rota you started with
| Team size | What usually works |
|---|---|
| 1 | Hours set honestly, strong after-hours automation |
| 2–3 | A weekly pattern, split shifts at weekends, manual or round-robin |
| 4–8 | Overlap at peak hours, capacity limits, round-robin |
| 8+ | Teams by topic, balanced assignment, overrides used properly |
The transitions matter more than the sizes. Each one is prompted by a specific pain — nobody covering evenings, one person always overloaded, specialised questions reaching the wrong desk — and the right time to change is when that pain appears rather than on a schedule.
The short version
Build the weekly pattern from when messages actually arrive, use split shifts rather than pretending breaks do not exist, express holidays as organisation-wide overrides, and set an automatic away timer so an open tab does not count as somebody at their desk.
Common questions from teams setting this up
Do shifts stop someone working outside them?
No. They can sign in and reply whenever they like. What shifts change is whether work is given to them automatically, which is a different thing and the one that matters for a rota.
What if two people are rostered at the same time?
That is the normal case and it is what the assignment mode is for. Overlap at your busiest hours is a design choice rather than a mistake.
How do I handle a sudden absence?
A dated override for that person, set to off. It replaces the weekly pattern for that date only, and it takes seconds.
Should the rota match our published opening hours?
Usually, but not always. A store that answers messages for an hour after it closes should roster that hour, because otherwise the system will queue conversations somebody is sitting there ready to take.