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When someone texts you while you’re closed, iBubbl can answer for you: “Thanks for your message! We’re closed right now and will get back to you tomorrow at 8:00 AM CST.” It’s a ready-made workflow you can edit.

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Set it up

  1. Set your business hours. Go to Settings → Hours → Business hours. By default they are the same as your booking hours. Turn that off to set different ones. Business hours use your own time zone, which is shown next to the schedule.
  2. Create the workflow. On Automations, choose New workflow → After-hours auto-reply. It’s created as a draft.
  3. Edit the message if you like, then Activate it.

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What it does

  • About 2 minutes after the text. The wait gives your team a chance to answer first. If anyone replies in that time, from the dashboard, the API, an integration or a scheduled send, no auto-reply goes out.
  • Checked at the moment it would reply, not when the text arrived. A text at 8:59 AM whose reply would go out at 9:01 AM, after you’ve opened, gets no “we’re closed” message.
  • Once per contact every 12 hours. Three texts in one evening get one reply. This also stops two businesses’ auto-replies from answering each other all night. You can change the number of hours on the Send step (At most once per contact every N hours), from 1 to 168. While the step is set to Send right away even outside sending hours, the limit can’t be turned off: the workflow won’t activate without it.
  • Direct messages only. Group chats never get an auto-reply. The reply would go to one person privately, not to the group.
  • It answers even outside your sending hours, because it is a reply to someone who just texted you. That exception applies only for 20 minutes after their message arrived. If the reply can’t go out in that time, for example because your line is offline, it is cancelled so that it never arrives later. A cancelled reply fires message.cancelled.
  • The after-hours tag lets you filter your inbox in the morning and pick up those conversations first.
The message can include {{ live.next_open_label }}, which reads like “tomorrow at 8:00 AM CST” or “Monday at 8:00 AM CST”, in your time zone. If no day is open, it falls back to the text after or, “as soon as we can” in the template.

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Testing it

Open the workflow’s Test tab. You can choose whether to treat the business as open or closed and whether a rep has replied, then see which path the workflow takes without sending anything.

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Limits

  • Holidays and one-off closures aren’t supported yet. Business hours are a weekly schedule.
  • STOP messages and opted-out or blocked contacts never start the workflow.