Support hours tell Essential Support when your team is actually available. They power the AI instant-answer follow-up promise, and gate the Schedule send and (indirectly) snooze features — so it’s worth setting them up before you rely on any of those.
Set your hours
- Open Settings (the gear icon) → Tickets → Availability. This tab is owner-only.
- Check “Set support hours” to turn availability on. Leaving it off means the console never treats any hour as “outside support hours” — Send during support hours stays unavailable everywhere, and the AI instant-answer follow-up promise falls back to a generic timeframe instead of your real hours.
- Choose your Time zone from the dropdown. Every day and time you set below is in this zone.
- For each day of the week, check its box to mark it a working day. Once checked, set a Start and End time with the time pickers. Leaving a day unchecked shows “Closed” for that day.
- A live Summary line beneath the days previews your exact schedule in plain language — check it before saving.
- Click Save. “Saved.” confirms it, and the change takes effect immediately everywhere it’s used.
What support hours control
- The AI instant-answer follow-up promise (Settings → AI features → Instant answers) can tell customers a real person will follow up within your actual support hours instead of every day.
- The composer’s “Send during support hours” option only appears when support hours are on and it’s currently outside them — see “Schedule a reply to send later.”
- Snoozing a ticket wakes it at the next local midnight regardless of this schedule — it doesn’t read your support hours the way Schedule send does.
Edge case: an incomplete schedule
If you check a day but never set real Start/End times for it, that day contributes nothing to the schedule. A schedule with no working days configured has no upcoming opening at all — so the “Send during support hours” option won’t appear anywhere in the console until you set at least one open day with real hours.