Chat Hours of Operation
AnsweredThere does not seem to be a way to actually display the hours of operation to our users anymore who try to start a chat. There is a checkbox to enable it in pre-chat forms and in the offline form but that does not actually do anything. I also confirmed with a member of the Zendesk team that that feature seems to have been deprecated without the checkbox being removed. The presence of that checkbox is confusing since it doesn't do anything.
There is a reasonable workaround in that the hours of operations can be included as text in the pre-chat greeting but there isn't a way to really show the hours of operation when we are offline. The offline form no longer can actually be shown for whatever reason so only the form to file a ticket is available when we're offline and we can't edit that in any way to show our hours of operation. So people who try to start a chat after hours are confused since they don't see our hours of operation posted anywhere and they think someone is going to respond to them which ends in them getting frustrated.
So all of this is to say that it would really be great if the hours of operation could actually be displayed on pre-chat forms natively (instead of using the pre-chat greeting textbox) and to also make sure there is a way to show the hours of operation on the form that is displayed when we are offline.
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Hi Dave,
Thanks for posting in the community. We haven't changed anything regarding the operating hours behaviour recently, so not sure why you are not seeing the operating hours link in the pre-chat form anymore.
Since you are using the Web Widget, the widget will show the ticket form when the account is offline and the Chat operating hours is not linked to the ticket creation experience.
Are you using any Javascript APIs, like filtering out the departments from the pre-chat form? Can you send a screenshot of what you are seeing?
Thanks,
Ramin
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Hi Ramin, I've actually gone over this with two other Zendesk support agents. I have also given the Zendesk team access to my account to review these settings and they have confirmed the problem I'm running into and they suggested I post here. I candidly was not expecting a solution since the Zendesk team have already dug into my account directly.
There are two main problems:
1. Operating hours are not displayed on the pre-chat form unless I manually type them into the pre-chat greeting message.
2. Offline form is never displayed - only the ticket form. Since there is not a way to edit the ticket form, I can't show our operating hours on there at all.
We do not have any custom javascript in place. We are just using default options available within Chat.
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Hi Dave,
I had a look at your account and widget/operating hours settings just now. Currently, you are using account level operating hours schedules.
If you have departments enabled with department level operating hours schedule and one of those departments were offline, it would show an option on the pre-chat form to see the schedule.
The link to show the operating hours schedule in the pre-chat form does not appear if you use account level schedules but will for department level schedules
The logic for the account level schedule is to show only on the offline form (for chat only/standalone accounts). Since you are using the contact form option in the Web Widget, the offline form is not visible to the end user.
In terms of displaying the schedule now, you would need to put the web widget in chat-only mode and use the ticket creation settings to create a ticket from the offline message sent via the offline form. In this scenario, the operating hours schedule would appear correctly on the offline form.
If you choose to use departments and department schedules down the road, it will show on the pre-chat form if the status of one of the departments is offline.
If none of this sounds appealing to you, the only other solution would be to put it in the pre-chat greeting area like you have right now.
-Ramin
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Hi Ramin,
Thank you for this explanation.
My main focus is more of the offline form since the pre-chat greeting for the pre-chat form works fine for us. My main/original concern around the hours of operation was more focused on the offline form.
That said, I think I might have tried this before but can you provide me with the steps required to put the web widget in "chat-only mode?"
In my original conversation with a Zendesk chat agent, I had to disable the Contact Form but when I did that, there was no longer an option to leave us a message through the web widget at all which meant that no one actually could fill out an offline form of some kind. Would I need to use the department schedule in order to show the offline form when I disable the Contact Form?
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What the previous advocate showed you around turning the 'Contact form' setting off is how you would put the Web Widget in chat-only mode. Once that is done, you can go back to the Chat dashboard and enable the offline form that will be shown to the visitor when no chat agents are online.
You can learn more about the offline form settings here: https://chat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218262477-Managing-Offline-Form-settings
If you want tickets to be created from the offline messages, ensure that you have the correct ticket creation settings enabled: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661666-Setting-up-Zopim-Chat-in-Zendesk#topic_k3r_g4t_h4
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Hi Ramin,
Thank you for confirming but I've actually already taken these steps and was not able to get the web widget to actually show the offline form while we were offline. I'm not sure if something is broken or if I'm missing something but I'll try to test this out again the next time I have a chance to run more tests during off hours.
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