Set up business hours

Everything lives in one place: Settings → Communication → Availability. Instead of cloning “we’re closed” workflows for every channel and every time window, you set your hours once and the whole platform reads from them.

Here’s the key idea: most businesses need almost no setup. Set your hours, switch on the away message, and you’re done. Reach for workflows only when you want something more advanced than a single auto-reply.

The page has four parts, and you’ll meet each one below:

• Business Hours — a weekly grid of when you’re open.
• Auto Away Message — an optional auto-reply for when you’re closed.
• Special Dates — one-off overrides for holidays and exceptions.
• Workflow Integration — your open/closed status, exposed to workflows.

Toggle each day on or off and pick the times you’re open (in 30-minute steps). Need a lunch break or a split shift? Add a second slot to the same day with the + button. Hours that run past midnight are fine too — set the end time earlier than the start and a +1 day badge appears.

The Auto Away Message is off by default — you have to switch it on. Once you do, anyone who messages while you’re closed gets your reply automatically, on the same channel they wrote from (WhatsApp, Telegram, and so on). For most businesses, this toggle plus your hours is the whole job — everything after this section is optional.

Picture someone mid-conversation with your AI agent at 9pm. You don’t want a blunt “we’re closed” to land in the middle of it. Under Suppress Away Message, pick the workflows where the away reply should stay quiet. While a contact is active in one of them, the away message is held back.

The rule is simple: if a contact is active in a selected workflow, no away message. Once they exit it, they’re eligible again. A contact in some other workflow (say a background tagging one) still gets the away message as normal.

Closing for a public holiday, or opening with odd hours for a one-off? Add a special date instead of touching your weekly grid. Give it a label, a date (or a date range), and mark it Closed or Open with custom hours.

If Auto Away Message is on, you can give the date its own message override — perfect for a festive note. Saved dates show as cards you can edit or delete:

When a message arrives, Exabloom works top-down through these rules and stops at the first match. Special dates always win over your weekly schedule.

Everything so far covers the common case. This is the advanced tier — skip it unless the basic away message isn’t enough. When you do want more (different replies, escalation, holding a follow-up), your open/closed status is exposed to workflows as context variables you can branch on:

Drop them into a trigger filter (e.g. only enrol when business_status = OPEN) or an If/Else branch to route closed-hours messages differently:

Four common configurations, each built from the pieces above. Adapt, don’t copy exactly.

• Hours alone send nothing. Setting your schedule is useful on its own, but the away reply only goes out once you switch Auto Away Message on.
• No hours = always open. If you never configure a schedule, you’re treated as open around the clock and no away message ever fires.
• Expect one reply per 8 hours, not one per message — the throttle is per contact.
• Suppress your handling workflows so customers mid-chat with the AI agent don’t get a jarring “we’re closed”.
• Keep one special date active. Only a single special date is evaluated reliably right now — manage them one at a time.
• Status branching needs Auto Away on, and a Wait node never pauses for your hours — branch on status instead.