Before users can begin conversations with your agent, you need to set your agent's messaging availability in Business Messages.
If a user messages your agent during available hours, your agent greets the user with a welcome message and conversation starters. If the conversation starts outside of available hours, users see the agent's offline message. See Begin the conversation for more information about these messages.
Bot and human availability
You can specify separate bot and human representative availability.
If you have any sort of automation composing messages for your agent—whether the automation is an auto-responder telling users their place in a queue, a complex natural language understanding agent that has dynamic access to user details, or anything in between—specify bot messaging availability.
Human availability is a must if you want to launch an agent on Google-managed entry points, including location-based entry points and non-local entry points (except for Google Ads). For human availability, only specify the days of the week and hours that you have live agents available to answer questions.
If bot representatives are available 24 hours a day but human representatives are available from 8 AM to 8 PM, you can specify those independently.
Additionally, if you specify both bot and human availability, you can send live agent request suggestions to prompt users to request live agents if bot representatives can't fulfill their needs.
Update messaging availability
Prerequisites
Before you update messaging availability, you need the following items:
- Bot availability timezones, days of the week, and hours
- Human availability timezones, days of the week, and hours
Update agent availability
To update an agent's messaging availability,
- Open the Business Communications Developer Console and sign in with your Business Messages Google account.
- Choose your agent.
- In the left navigation, click Agent information.
- Under Primary and secondary interactions, set bot and/or human messaging availability.
Bot and human
- For Primary interaction, set Interaction type to Bot.
If bot messaging isn't always available, uncheck Always available and specify the available days, times, and timezone.
To add more availability times, click Add availability.
Click Add secondary interaction, and set Interaction type to Human.
If human messaging isn't always available, uncheck Always available and specify the available days, times, and timezone.
To add more availability times, click Add availability.
Bot-only
- For Primary interaction, set Interaction type to Bot.
If bot messaging isn't always available, uncheck Always available and specify the available days, times, and timezone.
To add more availability times, click Add availability.
Human-only
- For Primary interaction, set Interaction type to Human.
If human messaging isn't always available, uncheck Always available and specify the available days, times, and timezone.
To add more availability times, click Add availability.