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.

Instructions

1. Make sure to set your company’s hours accordingly. In your hours and targeting settings in your account, you can plan ahead by updating your automatic online/offline hours for the holidays. You can also do this in the mobile app if you’re on the go!
   
   
   
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 Team Availability message to set the right expectations.
3. Here are a few examples of Team Availability messages we’ve used to communicate with our customers and prospects on our site.
   
4. You can configure your team availability settings here (only available on Pro and above)
   

   Our Support Team is currently participating in a company all hands meeting to get us ready for the end of 2019! 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 28 and Friday November 29.  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 December 2! 🦃

   Hi there 👋Thanks for chatting in! The Drift team is at Camp eating s'mores and building stronger bonds from Thursday, August 22 to Saturday, August 24 🔥🍫

   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 🙏

5. 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:
   
   
   
6. Make sure to take advantage of our Bot costumes! These seasonal costumes make your brand stand out and get your customers into the spirit of whichever holiday you’re celebrating: