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Essential Support

Set your support hours (availability)

By Jon Henshaw2 min readUpdated

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

  1. Open Settings (the gear icon) → Tickets → Availability. This tab is owner-only.
  2. 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.
  3. Choose your Time zone from the dropdown. Every day and time you set below is in this zone.
  4. 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.
  5. A live Summary line beneath the days previews your exact schedule in plain language — check it before saving.
  6. 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.

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Source: https://help.essential.support/tickets-workflows/set-your-support-hours/