Chatterbox can answer opening-hours questions from times your business has published. It works outside business hours without anyone attending the chat. If the website does not settle a holiday, appointment, or exception, it says it cannot find the answer and asks for contact details instead of guessing that you are open.
A visitor asks whether you are open before work, after dinner, or on a public holiday. Chatterbox can answer opening-hours questions from times your business has published. When the available material does not settle an exception, it admits the gap and asks for contact details instead of turning an ordinary schedule into a promise.
What should your website say about business hours?
Publish the hours a customer can actually use. State the days, opening and closing times, and whether the last appointment or order happens earlier. If lunch closes the counter for an hour, put that beside the schedule. “Open daily” is not enough when Sunday has shorter hours.
Choose one primary place for this information. Chatterbox can learn from a site crawl, file upload, pasted text, or hand-typed Q&A. Repeating the schedule in all four creates four copies to update. A current contact page and an old footer can leave the knowledge base with two different closing times.
Write down what the hours describe. A clinic may open reception at 9am but see its first patient at 10am. A restaurant may be open while its kitchen has stopped taking orders. The chatbot should not have to infer which clock the visitor meant.
Can a website chatbot answer after the business closes?
Yes. Chatterbox can answer unattended outside business hours. If the published schedule says the salon reopens at 10am on Tuesday, a visitor asking on Monday night can get that information without waiting for someone to read the inbox.
Each answer shows the source passage it came from. That gives the visitor something checkable and gives the team a direct route back to the page if the answer looks wrong. The widget is surfacing the business's stated hours, not deciding when the doors should open.
This is useful precisely because nobody is at the desk. It does not mean nobody needs to maintain the schedule. A reliable answer at midnight still depends on a reliable page written during the day.
When should an hours question reach a person?
A normal weekly schedule does not settle every question. A visitor may ask about Diwali, a bandh, a private event, an emergency closure, or whether arriving ten minutes before closing leaves enough time for the service. If no source gives the answer, Chatterbox says it cannot find it and asks for the visitor's name, phone, and email.
The lead reaches the dashboard and by email for a person to handle. The widget captures the number; it does not place a call or imply that somebody is already reading the conversation.
This boundary prevents a likely answer from becoming a commitment. “We are usually open on Fridays” is not evidence that the business will open on this particular holiday. An honest handoff is better than sending a customer across town to a locked shutter.
How do you keep holiday opening hours current?
Update the primary page before the exception begins. Remove or correct repeated hours in the footer, FAQ, local listings on the site, and any uploaded document the knowledge base also uses. Then refresh the relevant source. Chatterbox allows a website source to be re-crawled once a day.
Test one ordinary question and one exception. Ask, “What time do you open on Wednesday?” and check that the answer shows the intended source passage. Then ask about a date the page does not mention. The second question should reach contact capture rather than borrow Wednesday's schedule.
Run the same check when the temporary hours end. Yesterday's special schedule can be as misleading as last year's opening time. The useful standard is simple: one current source for the hours you know, and a person for the day your website has not covered.