How To: Manage Your Chat Team's Online Hours (Schedules)

Feature Overview:

When setting up your chat conversation routing, it's likely that you only want Terminus Chat to notify your team members during their online working hours. Using Schedules, you can easily manage your team's availability.

When you assign a Schedule of online hours to a user, the schedule applies to chat conversation routing, Live View Notifications, and the user's availability for meetings booked via the Chat Scheduler tool.

This article contains the following sections:

• How to Create a Schedule
• How to Check Which Schedule is Assigned to a Chat User
• How to Assign a Schedule to a Chat User
• How to Allow End Users to Manage Their Own Availability

How to Create a Schedule:

1. Navigate to the "Schedules" page and click "Create New Schedule".

2. The "Create Schedule" modal will appear. Input a name, optional description, and time zone for this schedule. 

The optional description will appear on the list of schedules to help distinguish between schedules where necessary.

3. Update the weekly availability as needed. 

If you want to quickly copy times from one day and apply to additional days, you can click the blue clone icon and check the days that you would like to apply these settings:

You can also uncheck a day to indicate it as unavailable, meaning there are no online hours for that day:

4. Once you have configured the schedule details and weekly hours, click "Save".

5. The new schedule has been created and will appear in your list of schedules. 

Now that the schedule is created, you can click the ellipses icon to edit the schedule, clone the schedule (to easily create additional schedules), assign the schedule to chat users, or delete the schedule. Any modifications to the schedule will automatically apply to all users who have this scheduled assigned.

How to Check which Schedule is Assigned to a Chat User:

On the Members page, you will see a column called "Availability". This is where you can check which schedule is assigned to your team members.

Within this column, the following four values are possible:

• {Schedule Name} - This represents the name of the Schedule that is assigned to the user.
• Always Available - This chat user has 24 hours of availability.
  • When a new user is added to your Terminus Chat team, their default availability will be set to "Always Available."
• Never - This chat user is never available.
  • We only recommend this setting for Chat Administrators who will not be answering chats.
• Custom - This chat user has assigned custom hours to themselves.
  • Refer to section "How to Allow End Users to Control Their Own Availability" below)

How to Assign a Schedule to a Chat User:

There are two ways to assign schedules to your chat users: from the Schedules page and from the Members page.  

From the Schedules Page:

This option is best when you want to assign a schedule to multiple users at once. In this example, we'll assign the "East Coast Online" schedule for example user Mallory Smith.

1. Navigate to the Schedules page and select the Schedule you want to assign, then select "Assign Schedule".

2. The "Assign Schedule to Users" modal will appear. Any users who already have this schedule assigned to them will appear as check. Check any users that you'd like to assign this schedule and click "Save".

3. The Members Page will now reflect the newly assigned schedule.

From the Members Page:

This option is best when you only need to update one user's schedule. In this example, we'll assign a schedule for example user Hannah Lee to overwrite Custom Hours.

1. Navigate to the Members page and select the ellipses for the chat user you'd like to update, then select "Assign Schedule".

2. The "Assign Schedule" modal will appear. Choose the schedule that you would like to assign and click "Save".

3. The Members page will now reflect the newly assigned schedule. 

How to Allow End Users to Manage Their Own Availability:

By default, Terminus Chat users have the ability to update their own availability within User Settings by selecting a Schedule or adding Custom Hours. Allowing users to define their own availability can help limit the work required for Chat Administrators.

However, if you'd like to turn off this ability and only allow your team's online hours to be managed by Chat Administrators, simply navigate to the Settings page for your team and switch off the "Allow End Users to Set Their Own Schedules" toggle: