Step 8: Setting Team Hours

Setting team hours is an important part of setting up your Drift account and going live. With Drift, you can set up Teams that manage certain online/offline hours as well as target Playbooks when specific groups of people are available to help. To learn more about setting up, managing and targeting teams, click here. 

Note: The Teams feature is available on our Premium and Enterprise plans. For teams NOT on these plans, click here to learn more about your Drift hours and how to update them. 

To create teams:

1. Go to Settings
2. Under settings locate Organization Settings in the side navigation
3. Click Teams

Select the button labelled “Create team”

Team Hours 

Once a team is created, the important next step is to define that team's hours. Once a new team is created, the default is set to always online. If this doesn’t fit your team’s schedule, it’s necessary to edit those default hours. 

To edit team hours: 

1. Go to Settings
2. Under settings locate Organization Settings in the side navigation
3. Click Teams
4. Select the team you want to update 
5. Click the button labelled “Scheduled available hours” 
6. Edit the timezone and hours that team operates in 

Team Availability

When a customer chats in through Drift, you may not always be able to respond. You can configure Drift Bot to help by messaging the customer to make sure no conversations slip through the cracks! 

This is a feature that complements the live chat & routing features and does not apply to specific Teams. To learn more about team availability, click here. 

To set team availability: 

1. Go to Settings
2. Under settings locate App Settings in the side navigation
3. Click Bot 
4. Select “Team Availability” 
5. Customize your team's availability 

Conversation Routing Rules 

The Default Routing Rule is available on all Drift accounts. Conditional Conversation Routing rules are available on the Essential plan and above.

The Conversation Routing Rules determine which team members are added to a conversation, depending on a set of criteria. It's important that your customers and leads talk to the right person at the right time.

Within your organization, you may have teammates or reps who are responsible for certain territories or you may want your marketing team handle conversations from people who started on your events page.

You can create different rules for your Conversation Routing right from within the Drift app! To learn more about conversation routing, click here. 

To create new routing rule: 

1. Go to Settings 
2. Under settings locate Conversation Routing in the side navigation
3. Click the button labelled “Create New Rule” 
4. Select “Add Condition”
5. Set the parameters of your routing rule 

If you can’t find it, here’s a link to the correct page in your Drift account.  

Now let's wrap up with a Go-Live Checklist!