Keeping your AI chat open around the clock means a visitor who asks a question at 9pm on a Sunday gets an answer at 9pm on a Sunday, not on Monday afternoon. On the levelpartner.ai platform you can run the website chat with an AI agent outside office hours and with your team inside them, using one widget and one inbox. This article answers how to split chat between AI and people by time of day, so the chat is never closed and never answered badly.
Why closed chat costs more than no chat
A chat widget that says "we are offline, leave a message" is worse than a contact form. It promises a conversation and delivers a form. Visitors who wanted an answer leave, and many will not come back on Monday.
Check your own analytics and you will often find many visits arrive in the evening and at weekends, when prospects have time to research. That is exactly when the office is closed. An open chat answered by AI turns those visits into conversations, booked meetings and leads with full details for your team in the morning.
Three ways to split the hours
The first option is AI all the time, with hand-off to a person during office hours when the agent needs help. This suits firms with a small team and high chat volume.
The second is people in office hours and AI outside them, which is the agent's Working Hours schedule set to your closed periods. This suits firms where clients expect a named person during the day, such as consultants and mortgage brokers.
The third is AI first at all hours, with a person joining any conversation that reaches a certain point, for example a booked meeting or a pricing question. This suits agencies and real estate firms where speed matters more than who answers.
Before you start
- The chat widget installed on your website and connected to Conversations.
- An AI agent with a knowledge base, booking action and hand-off rule.
- Your office hours agreed, with the correct time zone, so you can enter them as the agent's working hours.
- A decision on which of the three splits you will run.
- Notifications switched on for the people who answer chat in office hours.
How to set it up
- Go to Settings > Labs and turn on Working Hours.
- Open AI Agents > Conversation AI > Agents List and choose the agent.
- Open the Deploy tab and click Working Hours.
- Turn on Active Hours.
- Tick the channels that should follow the schedule, including Chat Widget.
- Pick Contact Timezone or Business Timezone.
- Choose the working days and set start and end times.
- Set after-hours options such as Off-Hours Auto-Reply and Team Notifications.
- Review the schedule and click Save.
Morning hand-over
The morning hand-over is where an open chat pays off or fails. Overnight conversations that booked a meeting need nothing. Conversations that ended with a question the agent could not answer need a person within the first hour of the day. Assign them automatically and put them at the top of the inbox.
Say the widget shows an offline message after 6pm and collects about 20 messages a week. If an agent answering out of hours drew 60 overnight conversations a week, and a third of those ended in a booked call, that would be 20 booked calls a week before anyone arrives. The morning team would handle the rest before 10am.
What it replaces
An open AI chat replaces the offline form, the out-of-hours answering service for web enquiries and the habit of starting each Monday with a backlog. It does not replace your team during the day, unless you choose the first split. In practice most firms find people handle fewer, better conversations once the AI deals with the repeated questions.
The common mistake is hiding the AI in office hours and showing it only at night. Visitors then meet two different experiences on the same site. Tell them plainly who is answering at any time, and keep the tone consistent between the agent and your team.
When not to keep chat open
If your service is urgent and the AI cannot resolve urgent issues, for example a property emergency, do not imply that chat will help at 2am. Point those visitors to a phone line instead. And if you cannot clear the overnight queue each morning, an open chat creates expectations you will miss.
Weekly running time
Twenty minutes a week: check the overnight queue was cleared on time each morning, read a few out-of-hours conversations and adjust the greeting or hand-off rule.
Troubleshooting
The AI replies during office hours when it should not. The Working Hours schedule on the agent's Deploy tab is wrong, or the timezone choice is off. Fix it and test again.
Visitors wait during office hours. Notifications are reaching nobody. Assign chat to a team and set a fallback so the agent replies if nobody picks up within a few minutes.
Overnight leads are not followed up. The summary workflow is missing or goes to a shared inbox. Send it to a named person and assign each conversation.
People and AI reply to the same chat. Use the Human Handover action so the agent pauses for a set time once it passes a conversation to your team.
Frequently asked questions
Can the AI chat stay open on weekends and bank holidays?
Yes. Include weekends in the agent's working days, or leave its Working Hours off so it answers at all times. Update the greeting for long closures, such as the Christmas period, so visitors know when a person will be back.
Does the chat need to be on every page?
No. Put it where visitors have questions, usually service, pricing and contact pages. The AI chat site guide covers page placement in detail.
What if a visitor asks for a human out of hours?
The agent should say when a person will be available and offer to book a time or take a callback request. Do not let it pretend a person is coming soon. For more on supervising these conversations, see AI chatting online and AI customer support.