How To Set Up Your Drift Account For The Holiday Season/When You’re Offline

Overview

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.

Admin Instructions

1. Make sure to set your company’s hours accordingly. In your hours and targeting settings of your Widget, you can plan ahead by updating your automatic online/offline hours for the holidays. 
   
   
   
2. 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)
   
3. You can configure your team availability settings by going to Settings > Workspaces > Team >  Hours tab (only available on Premium and above)
4. You can update the messages across all of your bots that set expectations upfront that your team is not available. 

Here is some of the messaging we’ve used in the past:

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

Chat Rep Instructions

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 the Meetings tab
2. Click Availability
3. Click Mark yourself as out of office and set the date and time you will be out of office until and whether or not the status should clear on its own. Be sure to click save! 

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