How to Handle Website Chats After Hours

To handle website chats after hours, let the AI answer questions covered by your published policies and turn the rest into tickets. Tell customers when a person will reply, and assign someone to check those tickets in the morning. I’d test the whole process with every teammate marked offline before making it available.

If someone asks whether you ship to their ZIP code at 10 p.m., an accurate answer can help them decide that night. If they need to change an order, they need to know who will follow up and when. I’d write that expectation into the chat before adding any automation.

Read Kurt’s In-Depth Text.com Review

What Can the AI Answer Overnight?

Start with opening hours, delivery areas, and other answers you can verify against your own pages. Give the bot an instruction to send requests outside those rules to a person. Test a question that looks routine but has an exception, such as a special delivery date.

What Should the Ticket Capture?

Ask for a reply address and the information the team actually needs to follow up. Text.com documents a ticket fallback if the AI can’t answer or no teammate picks up a transfer. Check that the ticket reaches the right queue and includes the context needed to reply.

What Happens If the AI Runs Out of Capacity?

Ask the vendor what happens when the included AI allowance runs out and test an offline fallback. Text.com’s pricing and help pages describe different refill behavior. I’d confirm whether chats pause or generate an extra charge before relying on the AI overnight. AI limits and billing in my Text.com review

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