What your customers see outside your hours
What the widget says when you are closed, and why taking an email beats hiding.
Outside the opening hours you set for a website, the chat window changes rather than disappearing.
What they see
The widget says you are away and when you will be back, and offers to take a message with an email address so you can answer in the morning.
The launcher stays on the page. Somebody with a question at eleven at night can still ask it, and it reaches you.
Why not just hide it
Because the question does not go away with the widget. It becomes an email you never got, or a sale that did not happen, and you never learn either.
The other reason is that hiding it is indistinguishable, from the visitor’s side, from your chat being broken. “Away until 9am” is information. An absent launcher is a mystery.
What happens to those messages
They arrive as ordinary conversations in the inbox, and because there is an email address attached, replying reaches the person even though they left hours ago. It is the same mechanism that covers somebody wandering off mid-chat.
Being honest beats being available
The temptation is to leave hours off so you look always-on. It reliably backfires: a visitor told you are online and then left waiting has a worse experience than one told you are closed.
If you answer in the evenings sometimes, set the hours to when you reliably answer, not to when you might. Beating your own stated hours is a pleasant surprise. Missing them is a complaint.
Turning it off for longer
For a week rather than a night, pause the widget instead. Hours are for the daily rhythm; pausing is for the fortnight you are shut.
Last updated 22 September 2026.