Configuring Operating Hours and out-of-hours behaviour

What Operating Hours does

Operating Hours lets you define when human agents are available and control how the AI behaves when they are offline. The AI always knows the current status and adjusts accordingly.

Where to find it

Go to Settings and scroll down to the Operating Hours card, which appears below Your Profile.

Timezone

Enter an IANA timezone name such as Africa/Johannesburg, Europe/London, or America/New_York. All schedule times are evaluated in this timezone.

Weekly schedule

Toggle each day open or closed using the switch. For open days, set the opening and closing time using the time pickers. The AI will treat any time outside these windows as out-of-hours.

Out-of-hours behaviour modes

• Unavailable — the AI sends your configured afterhours reply on the customer's first message, then goes silent for the rest of that session. Subsequent messages are logged so agents see them when they come online.
• Continue — the AI responds and escalates as normal. It knows agents are offline and can tell the customer this if disclosure is enabled. Slack notifications go out immediately.
• Queue — the AI still responds, but any Slack Assist escalation is held back and delivered at the next opening time. Useful when you don't want to flood the team overnight.

Afterhours reply (Unavailable mode)

The message sent once to the customer outside operating hours. Keep it brief and include when they can expect a response, e.g. "Thanks for reaching out! Our team is offline right now. We'll be back Monday at 09:00 SAST."

Disclose out-of-hours (Continue / Queue modes)

When enabled, the AI proactively tells customers that human agents are currently offline. You can customise the disclosure text or leave it blank to use the default phrasing. If disabled, the AI will not volunteer this information unless directly asked.

Public holidays

Days listed here are treated as fully closed regardless of the weekly schedule. Two ways to add them:

• Auto-import — enter your country's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (e.g. ZA for South Africa, GB for UK) and click Import holidays to pull in the current year's public holidays from the Nager.Date database. Re-import at the start of each year.
• Manual — pick any date and give it a name. Useful for company closure days that aren't public holidays.

Delete individual holidays at any time using the bin icon.

Queue flush — when does it happen?

In Queue mode, queued Slack escalations are sent at the next opening time. The system checks every minute (driven by the same cron that powers Pulse). Each queued escalation creates its own Slack thread — same format as if it had been sent in real time, so the team can action each individually.

Slack Assist and on-hold tickets

When an agent escalates to Slack, the linked Zendesk ticket is automatically set to On-Hold so the Pulse clean-up task won't auto-solve a ticket actively waiting for an internal team response. Once the team forwards a reply or resolves the thread, the ticket is returned to Open.