Configure business hours per team, per channel and per region with a holiday calendar that respects Diwali, Eid, Christmas and your bank-holiday list. SLAs pause overnight, after-hours auto-replies set expectations, and WhatsApp-window-aware bots keep conversations alive until morning.
A customer sends a WhatsApp message at 11:42 pm on a Sunday asking about an order. Nobody is online. By the time your team reaches the queue at 9 am Monday — assuming Monday is not Eid — the customer has already DMed you on Instagram, tweeted at you, and opened a chargeback dispute. The original WhatsApp service window is hours from expiring, so even when an agent eventually replies, they may be forced into an awkward template re-engagement. The team did nothing wrong; the system simply had no way to acknowledge the message and set expectations.
The inverse failure is just as bad. A US-based founder pings your sales chat at 2pm Pacific — which is 2:30 am IST — and gets an instant reply from a junior agent who is technically logged in but should be asleep. The reply is rushed, the lead is mis-qualified, and the founder thinks the company is either an offshore sweatshop or unprofessional.
Business hours routing is the small, boring feature that fixes both of these. Configured properly, it tells the customer when to expect a reply, hands the conversation to a bot or AI that can actually help in the meantime, and resumes the SLA clock only when humans are around to honour it. It also lets you run a follow-the-sun model with a Delhi day team and a Lisbon evening team without anyone burning out.
Wachat lets you define business hours at three levels: workspace (the company default), team (Sales, Support, Tier 2), and channel (WhatsApp Sales, Web Chat Docs, Email Billing). Hours are timezone-aware and can be different for each weekday — for example, Sales might run 09:00-19:00 IST Monday to Friday and 10:00-15:00 IST on Saturdays. Holiday calendars apply automatically: pick from regional presets (India national + state-level for Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Karnataka etc., plus US, UK, EU defaults) or upload a CSV of custom dates with full or half-day designations.
When a message arrives outside business hours, Wachat fires the after-hours rule for the targeted team or channel. The rule can send a free-form text (for web chat and Instagram inside their respective message windows), trigger a flow (collect priority, route to on-call), or send a Meta-approved Utility template for WhatsApp (since free-form sends are only valid inside the 24-hour service window, but inbound messages auto-open that window). The auto-reply can include the expected response time computed from the next business hours block — "We'll be back at 09:00 IST tomorrow, about 11 hours from now" — instead of a generic "we are away".
SLA timers respect business hours. A "first response within 30 minutes" SLA on the Sales team only counts minutes that fall inside Sales' business hours. If a message arrives at 22:00, the timer does not start until 09:00 the next morning, so agents are not penalised for breaches caused by company policy. Supervisors see the projected SLA deadline ("by 09:30 tomorrow") in the queue, not a misleading "30 minutes" countdown.
For multi-region teams, Wachat supports follow-the-sun routing. Configure a Delhi team running 09:00-19:00 IST, a Lisbon team running 09:00-19:00 WET, and an Austin team running 09:00-19:00 CT, and Wachat hands conversations across regions automatically as each team starts and ends their day. The handover note ("escalating to Lisbon — last message was a refund request, customer is verified") generates with an AI summary so the receiving region picks up cold cases warm.
Define business hours at workspace, team and channel level. Specific scopes override broader ones. Per-weekday and per-half-day granularity supports the messy reality of Indian operations — Saturday half-days, Sunday Sales-only, etc.
One-click presets for India national holidays plus state-level lists (Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Karnataka, Delhi, Gujarat). Also US, UK, EU and Singapore defaults. CSV upload for custom internal holidays like "founders' day".
WhatsApp gets a Meta-approved Utility template auto-reply; web chat gets a free-form message with the next-open ETA; email gets a polite auto-responder with the expected SLA. Each is configured separately and tested in the admin UI.
SLA timers pause off-hours and resume at the next business window. The queue shows projected breach time in the local timezone of the assigned team, not a misleading raw countdown.
Hand conversations across regional teams automatically as time zones rotate. The leaving team's AI-generated handover note ("customer wants refund, order #3421, opened 2h ago") attaches to the conversation for the receiving team.
Mark conversations as VIP, P0 or escalated and they bypass off-hours rules — paging the on-call agent via Slack, SMS or push notification. Useful for enterprise contracts with 24x7 SLAs on a subset of customers.
Show your business hours on the web widget and in WhatsApp greetings via a merge field. The customer always knows when to expect a reply, which reduces "are you there?" follow-ups by roughly half in our customer cohort.
A solo consultant running a 60-customer book sets business hours 10:00-18:00 IST Monday to Thursday, and pure-AI Friday to Sunday. The AI handles 70% of weekend questions; the rest queue up as Monday 10:00 tasks with the conversation summary at the top, so Friday's pizza night stays uninterrupted.
A skincare D2C brand sees 40% of cart-question WhatsApps arrive between 22:00 and 02:00 IST. After-hours auto-reply sends a Utility template confirming receipt with an order-status link and a "we'll reply by 09:00" promise. Morning agents pick up an already-acknowledged queue, cutting abandoned carts by 14%.
A vertical SaaS runs business hours for standard customers but enables 24x7 routing for enterprise VIPs tagged in the CRM. The on-call rotation in PagerDuty is wired in — a P0 ticket from a VIP pages the on-call engineer in 90 seconds, even at 3 am, while standard customers see the polite "back at 09:00" template.
A test-prep platform serves students in India, the Gulf and Southeast Asia. Three regional teams run 09:00-21:00 in their own zones, with handovers and AI summaries. A student in Dubai who messages at 22:00 GST hits the India late shift, not a closed inbox.
A 14-clinic dental chain has different hours per branch. Wachat routes WhatsApp messages to the nearest clinic's local team during their hours, and to a central night team for genuine emergencies — with the patient's last visit and treatment plan attached, regardless of which clinic they normally attend.
Business Hours Routing is included on every SabNode workspace. No separate billing, no extra setup — flip it on from your workspace settings.
Set your workspace timezone, default business hours (e.g. 10:00-18:00 IST Mon-Sat), and pick a holiday-calendar preset for your region. This becomes the fallback for everything.
Sales might run earlier and later; Tier 1 Support might cover full weekdays; Tier 2 Engineering might be weekday-only with on-call rotation. Configure each team's hours and exceptions.
Set WhatsApp Sales to 09:00-21:00, Web Chat Docs to 10:00-19:00, Email Billing to 10:00-18:00. Each gets its own after-hours auto-reply tuned to the channel and audience.
Define first-response and resolution SLAs per team and channel, with the option to apply them business-hours-only or 24x7. Configure breach alerts (email, Slack, push) for assignees and supervisors.
Use the simulator to send a test message at any chosen time and see which rule fires. Monitor the after-hours dashboard: messages received off-hours, auto-replies sent, AI conversations resolved, and follow-up rate when the team logs back in.
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