This article explains how to create an out-of-office workflow that replies when your team is unavailable.

An out-of-office responder can set expectations, collect useful context, and keep the conversation organized until your team returns. You can also combine it with Hugo or knowledge resources when users should receive helpful answers before an agent follows up.

Video Guide: The Out-of-Office Responder

In this video, you’ll learn how to build an Out-of-Office flow using the Chatbot Builder, how to trigger it outside your business hours, and how to adapt it to your exact support schedule. Let's have a closer look at this!

You can also easily adapt it in order to display a different message based on the user's language. Our Chatbot software can automatically detect the user's country and locale in order to provide a tailored experience.

Illustrated Guide: A quick Out-of-Office Responder

Now, let's have a look at an all-around away responder.

The idea here is to create a workflow that will help us respond to customers not only during the out-of-office hours of our business, but whenever your team is offline or outside your defined business hours.

We'll go through the basics to help you understand how such a workflow can be deployed, and give you some tips to adapt it to various situations.

1. Our Entry block, where we will connect our first Event block to start the workflow

2. We want our responder to listen to incoming messages, so we'll use the event block "User Message Matches" with the wildcard * as Match value, to detect all messages. You can optionally restrict this responder to specific channels (Instagram, WhatsApp…) by adjusting Message Origins in this block.

3. We’ll split the workflow into two branches using the “Support is Available” condition block, in order to handle both cases:

• one branch with the condition "online"
• the other branch with the condition "offline"

If the support is offline, we'll want to directly send our away message. Otherwise, let's check for more conditions in the next step.

4. Now let's detect the current day. Our team is off on the weekend, so we can also split our workflow into 2 branches here with condition blocks "Current Day":

• one branch when the days match Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday
• one branch with the same days, but with the setting "is not" to detect the opposite (when the current day doesn't match those we listed)

Here, we would also have checked if the days match Saturday or Sunday instead of checking if they don't match Monday to Friday. Both approaches are perfectly valid.

If this is a weekday, we'll now want to check the time at which the user messaged us, otherwise, if we're on weekend, we know that we simply want to send our away message.

5. Let's now check the current time to see if our responder should take over.

Our business is opened from 09:00 to 18:00 GMT+1 so we'll simply add a condition "Current Hour" and enable select the "is not" parameter in order to check when the current time does not match the specified hours.

Similarly, here we are checking if the current time doesn't match the time range we specified. We could also check if the current time is between 18:00 and 09:00 for instance, the Workflow allows us some freedom in our approach.

6. Time to send our away message! We can do this with an Action block "Send Message: Text". There you can also specify different messages for various languages if you'd like your users to receive a localized version:)

7. The **Stop Workflow exit block prevents our workflow from triggering again in that same conversation for the next 24 hours.**

This means that users will only see our away message once for the day, even if they send additional messages afterwards.

8. Optional: Using AI in your Out-of-Office workflow.

If you want to extend your Out-of-Office responder with AI, here’s the block you can add directly inside your workflow:

• Hugo, which generates replies automatically using the knowledge stored in your AI Data Hub; including help articles, previous conversations, snippets, internal documents, or external web pages.

Beyond the workflow, Crisp’s AI features can also assist before and after conversations happen. AI Overlay uses the same knowledge base to suggest instant answers directly in the help widget, helping users resolve issues before they even open the chat. Once a conversation starts, AI Summary provides a concise morning recap of overnight interactions so your agents can instantly catch up without reading full threads.

Together, these tools complement your Out-of-Office flow: Hugo handles automated responses during the night, AI Overlay reduces incoming requests, and AI Summary helps your team start the day with full context.

Your Out-of-Office responder is now ready! Don't forget to save and deploy your modifications before leaving the editor of course.

In our example, we're simply sending a message to let our users know we'll soon be back, but you can choose to perform different actions as well, such as asking them for their email address and various information, offering them a list of choice buttons, or starting another workflow you have prepared!

⬇️ If you would like to review this workflow directly, you can download our example right here, and import it in your Workflow Builder to take a closer look on your end.

And for those of you who have more questions and would like to dig deeper, don't hesitate checking our Understanding and Mastering the Workflow Builder guide to learn more about the different blocks and their configuration.

Updated on: 04/05/2026