Business Hours and Out-of-Office Replies on WhatsApp

Here is the uncomfortable fact about WhatsApp: customers treat it like a text from a friend, so they expect a friend's pace. A salon owner told us half her bookings messages arrive between 9 pm and midnight, exactly when her team is asleep. If those messages get nothing back, the customer opens another salon's chat.

An out-of-office reply will not make you available at midnight. What it does is tell the customer what happens next, which is most of what they wanted from you anyway.

What a good after-hours message says

Three things, in this order: that you got the message, when a human will reply, and what they can do in the meantime. That is it. Everything else is decoration.

Customers do not mind waiting. They mind not knowing how long.

A decent version for a clinic might read: 'Thanks for messaging. The clinic is closed until 9 am. We will reply to this chat by 10. For emergencies, please call the number below.' Short, specific and honest. Notice there is no 'sorry for the inconvenience'. Nobody reads that line.

Pick promises you can keep

The most common mistake is writing the time you wish you could reply, not the time you actually do. 'We reply within 5 minutes!' on a message that fires at 11 pm is a lie the customer catches by 11:10. Look at your real response times for a week, pad them, and put that in writing.

If your Sunday coverage is thin, say Sunday. If a festival closes the shop for three days, say the date you reopen. Specific beats vague every time, even when the specific answer is disappointing.

Different closures, different messages

• Nightly closing: short, with the opening time. Reuse it every day without edits.
• Weekly off day: mention the day by name and the next working day.
• Festival or holiday: include the reopening date and whether orders placed meanwhile will be processed in sequence.
• Staff on leave or a busy season: a temporary note that you can switch off, with a realistic delay.

Keep the holiday messages as separate drafts so you are not retyping under pressure the evening before Diwali. Turn them on, then turn them off. That last step is the one that gets forgotten, and a 'closed for Pongal' reply in February looks careless.

Do not reply twice to the same person

If a customer sends five messages in a row, they should see one out-of-office reply, not five. Most tools let you limit how often an automated message fires per contact; if yours does not, treat that as a real gap. Repeated identical replies make a business look like a machine that is broken.

Where the official API changes things

If you use the official Meta Cloud API, sending a free-form message is allowed only inside the customer-service window after the customer last wrote to you. An automated away message sent in response to their incoming message normally sits inside that window, but the rules and any related features are Meta's to define and can change. Check Meta's current documentation, and read our explainer on the 24-hour customer service window for the practical side.

The official WhatsApp Business app has its own away-message feature, and some people just use that. It is fine for a single phone. Once you have more than one number or want your own logic around it, a gateway like WA Getway gives you auto-replies plus an API and webhooks, so the same rules can apply in more places.

Pair it with a morning routine

The out-of-office message is a promise, and promises need a routine behind them. Someone opens the inbox first thing, sorts the overnight messages by urgency, and answers in order. If you have a team, agree who does this. Our post on a WhatsApp support workflow for a team of three shows a simple split.

Also keep the general rules in mind from our auto-reply setup guide: one acknowledgement per conversation, and never automate answers where being wrong costs money.

One more habit worth having: read your own away message from the customer's side once a quarter. Send it from a spare number at an odd hour and see how it feels. If it sounds cold, or the time it promises is already out of date, fix it that day. Small details like this are what customers remember when they decide whether you are reliable.

Setting this up takes twenty minutes and removes a lot of small friction. If your hours are unusual or you want rules that depend on your own systems, tell us about it on the contact page.