How does staff availability work?

Every staff member is either available or unavailable, and the flag is per person, not a store-wide switch. One agent can be at lunch while the rest of the team keeps taking handoffs.

Simple Chat reads that signal together with the business hours you set in General settings: is anyone marked available right now, and is the store inside its open hours? The AI uses the combined picture to set realistic expectations with customers, for example that a person will join during open hours, or that only automated help is on offer at the moment. Exact wording depends on your merchant instructions and the state of the conversation; the goal is fewer surprises about when a human will respond.

The statuses

Available means you can receive handoffs and work the inbox as normal. Unavailable means you're not taking new live work: meetings, breaks, end of shift. There's also a temporary override for stepping away briefly without changing your long-term default.

Day to day

Set unavailable when you're off shift or heads-down; customers and routing logic reflect that you're not on deck. Set available when you're actively watching the inbox. Use the override for short absences instead of flipping your default back and forth. And keep business hours accurate in General settings, because after-hours messaging is only as honest as the schedule behind it.

Availability is not presence

Seeing a conversation open in the dashboard is real-time presence, a separate thing. Presence helps avoid duplicate replies; availability tells the system and the AI whether live staff support is realistically on offer.