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Support across multiple time zones- In need of your best practises ๐Ÿ™


Nina

Hello! I would love some information on how you guys best support users across multiple time zones, I am currently facing a big issue that Intercom says is โ€˜expected behaviourโ€™, how do you get around this?

About us.
We have support teams in 3 countries, we have 3 teams set up with 3 different office hours. Our assignment rules work to make sure each conversation is assigned to the right team. Magic right?  Thereโ€™s 1 HUGE problem. The home screen of Intercom, where it says our office hours (โ€˜Weโ€™ll be back later todayโ€™), will only ever pull the default office hours, which is set to the UK.

This means that for 6 hours when our Japan team are online, all of our Japanese users see a message that tells them we are offline. The same happens at the other end of the day, when our UK team logs off, our US users see a message to say we will be back tomorrow, even though we have a team online waiting to help them.
 

This is happening for logged-in users, so we know their details, language and time zone. So why canโ€™t it tell them when their designated team are online?

I am tearing my hair out because this is a horrible user experience for anyone other than our UK users.
I know a lot of the intercom community uses Intercom to support multiple time zones, how do you get around this? 
Any thoughts or suggestions are very much appreciated on how you get around this. 
Thank you!! โญ๏ธ

4 replies

Diana Tripac
Intercom Team
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  • Senior Community Program Manager @Intercom
  • 154 replies
  • October 5, 2023

Hi @User1003! I am adding to the chat some of our Community Super Users and Experts in case they can advise or share any thoughts on that ๐Ÿ™Œ cc @Nathan Sudds @Milan @Kevin Bendixen  @Joseph S. 


Milan
Expert User โœจ
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  • Top Expert
  • 306 replies
  • October 5, 2023

@User1003 hi!

The writing below the โ€œSend us a messageโ€ depends only on global office hours. The Team office hours have no effect until the conversation is started and assigned to a team. 

Why donโ€™t you set global office hours to be โ€œEvery day 12am โ€“ 11:59pmโ€ and then it would say โ€œWe will reply as soon as we canโ€? And then when the conversation starts, and it is assigned to a proper team, they will get a more precise expectation when they will be served based on the team they were assigned to. 


Nathan Sudds
Expert User โœจ
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  • Top Expert
  • 296 replies
  • October 5, 2023

@User1003  I tend to agree with @Milan โ€˜s comments here the key thing is changing your main office hours to reflect that you generally are trying to be available 24 hours a day for customers but have different teams who do that so the office hours should reflect that and then the messaging should be more accurate.  Is that what you are doing?  Or is it that different teams handle different markets language wise and you are offering different support hours from those different teams based on languages and time zones?  If thatโ€™s the case there may not be an ideal solution other than the โ€œreply as soon as we canโ€ but maybe the other option, I mention below is viable for setting up the SLAs so any region is at least getting a sense of your overall response time before they contact you and get assigned to a team.  

Also you have the option to configure your availability message as well to something that reflects your SLAs or the expectations you would like to set with users outside of the dynamic response times -- that may be a good option as well, although dynamic is nice when it makes sense you could set it manually that might be more accurate or the expectation you want to set no matter what Intercom might calculate. 

I havenโ€™t needed to do this but I do wonder if thereโ€™s a way to get the team assigned before they see this message via language or some other method -- so that the response time is more dynamic from the beginning by identifying the team who requests would be going to before they open the messenger but if the Intercom team is saying itโ€™s not possible -- maybe itโ€™s not?  But, Iโ€™m more curious now if maybe thereโ€™s another workaround. 


 


Nina
  • Author
  • 3 replies
  • October 6, 2023

Thank you all for your help, this is really useful and I will explore these solutions. 

@Nathan Sudds Youโ€™ve summed it up well, we have different teams that handle different markets in different languages and the support is based on the users time zones. 

Nathan Sudds wrote:

I havenโ€™t needed to do this but I do wonder if thereโ€™s a way to get the team assigned before they see this message via language or some other method -- so that the response time is more dynamic from the beginning by identifying the team who requests would be going to before they open the messenger but if the Intercom team is saying itโ€™s not possible -- maybe itโ€™s not?  But, Iโ€™m more curious now if maybe thereโ€™s another workaround. 

This was my hope ^^, I was surprised it didnโ€™t do this automatically, but Iโ€™ve been told isnโ€™t an option. We use Intercom behind a login page so we have already captured all the details needed in order to divert the chats, but Intercom says that we are unable to show anything but the default hours before the chat has started. 

I will explore these suggestions, if anyone else has any other work arounds, they are also very welcome. I thought there must be a few people out there who are trying to use Intercom in a similar way to us ๐Ÿคž


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