The holiday’s are great, everyone gets to take some time off to relax and reset, but your website doesn’t just shut down when you do. 

Making sure that your Drift instance is set up for offline hours, especially during the holidays can help you continuously create better website experiences for your site visitors.

There are a few things that you can do when your team goes offline for the holidays to make sure you’re setting the right expectations for your future customers.

In this article we'll go over:

1. Admin Instructions
2. Example Messages
3. Instructions for Chat Reps

1. Admin Instructions

Make sure to set your company’s hours accordingly.  In the Status Tab of your Widget, you can plan ahead by updating your automatic online/offline hours for the holidays. 

You can find your Online/Offline hours under the Status tab by going to Settings > Drift Widget and then clicking the widget you'd like to modify.  

Set up any messages that send when a user is routed into a conversation. If you don’t want to update every single bot that you have with an offline message, or create an entirely new holiday hours bot, you can easily set up your Routing Fallback message to set the right expectations under Settings > Workspaces > Routing Fallbacks tab.  (Only available on Premium and Above)


You can configure your team availability settings by going to Settings > Workspaces and Teams >  Teams tab (only available on Premium and above) and then select the Hours tab after you have selected your team.


You can update the messages across all of your bots that set expectations upfront that your team is not available. 

2. Here is some example messaging we’ve used in the past:

Our Support Team is currently participating in a company all hands meeting to get us ready for the end of 2022! While we do have a few teammates online to help, response times might be slower than usual. Thanks for your patience and understanding 🙏

🦃Quick heads up: Our team is celebrating Thanksgiving in the United States on Thursday November 24 and Friday November 25.  We will have limited help due to the National Holiday so response times may be longer than normal. We'll be back in action on Monday November 28! 🦃

Hi there 👋Thanks for chatting in! The Drift team is at Camp eating s'mores and building stronger bonds from Thursday, August 18 to Saturday, August 20 🔥🍫

We'll have a couple of people ready to help with support between 9am-5pm ET, but we'll be back in action on Monday! Thank you for your patience 🙏
 

Scheduling your playbooks to turn off: 

You can also schedule to turn your playbooks off at a later date once your holiday season is over.  To do this, simply click the Publishing Pull down in your playbooks, and select Turn Off Later

 

3. Instructions for Chat Reps

Your chat reps can also take steps to ensure that they won't receive notifications or have meetings booked by bots without their knowledge while they are on PTO. To ensure the bot does not book meetings for you while you are out of office complete the following steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > App Settings > Meetings
2. Click Mark out of office and set the date and time you will be out of office until and you'll be all set. When this setting is enabled site visitors won't be able to book meetings with your Drift profile and bots won't book meetings for you.

Don't forget to pause your chat notifications too!

1. Click your profile icon
2. Click Custom and set how long you would like your notifications to be paused for