office hours when using Fin AI | Community
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Hi there, 

I'm trying to deploy Fin AI to our chat. We have office hours enabled, but Fin AI doesn't tell the user that wants to escalate to a human about the office hours. We don't have the plan to use workflows, only simple automations.

I was wondering if there is anything we can do to let the customer know, if they want to escalate their chat from Fin AI to a human, and if it's after office hours, we set expectations about getting back to them as soon as an agent gets online? Right now it just says “routing to a live agent.” and then the chat sits in the unassigned bucket in Intercom, customer not knowing if anyone would actually respond.

I tried putting office hours information in guidance but Fin didn’t use it.

 

 

When there is an escalation done with Fin, it always takes the path of “escalation”. Use a branch to see if you are or not within any kind of office hours (either default ones or custom). Then act accordingly

 

 

When there is an escalation done with Fin, it always takes the path of “escalation”. Use a branch to see if you are or not within any kind of office hours (either default ones or custom). Then act accordingly

 

 

That won’t work as we don’t have the plan to do workflows… 

My bad… I didn’t know this plan didn’t have workflows (and you said it now that I’m re-reading your message, sorry).

I’m afraid there won’t be much to do :( I assume that you are already sharing typical reply times from the Simple automation, even though that’s not very much helping for inside/outside office hours 

 

 

My bad… I didn’t know this plan didn’t have workflows (and you said it now that I’m re-reading your message, sorry).

I’m afraid there won’t be much to do :( I assume that you are already sharing typical reply times from the Simple automation, even though that’s not very much helping for inside/outside office hours 

 

 

Yeah unfortunately that option only shows time increments (minutes to days) and not a custom option. I spoke to Intercom support and they suggested just putting the office hours and expectations as part of Fin AI’s escalation to human guidance so I might just have to deal with it that way. 

Paul here from support engineering to help you out 🤝 

Right now, Fin’s default escalation message ("routing to a live agent") can’t be customized to include office hours context unless you use advanced Workflows. With just simple automations and Guidance, there’s no way to have Fin dynamically inform customers about your team’s availability or response times if they ask for a human outside office hours.

  • This is a known limitation: Guidance can customize tone and handover behavior, but can’t trigger time-aware or conditional escalation messages. You’ll see the same generic response regardless of current office hours, which is why customers may be left waiting in the unassigned queue without knowing when they’ll hear back.

  • The only way to set specific customer expectations after hours (e.g., "Our team will reply when back online during office hours") is by switching to Workflows, which let you add branching logic and tailored messages based on your schedule.

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