Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Departments, triggers and operating hours are chat's own versions of routing, automation and business hours.
Live chat is on its way out: Zendesk removes it on 31 January 2028 and no longer sells it to new customers. What is below still works until then, but any effort you put into it has an end date.
Departments
Chat's routing unit, separate from Support groups. A visitor is directed to a department, and agents belong to one or more.
- Create departments in the chat settings.
- Assign agents.
- Decide whether visitors choose. Once a department exists it appears on the pre-chat form automatically; taking it off again is a line of code rather than a setting.
Keep the number small. A visitor choosing between six departments is being asked to triage their own question.
Chat triggers
Separate again from ticket triggers and from messaging triggers. They act on what a visitor is doing: time on a page, which page, whether they have chatted before.
Used mainly for proactive invitations. The same caution applies as anywhere: specific and occasional beats general and constant.
Operating hours
Chat has its own, in the chat dashboard under Settings > Account > Operating hours. You can run one schedule for the whole account, or, with several departments enabled, give each department its own.
The account schedule wins. Hours applied to the whole account override hours applied to departments, which is the opposite of what most people assume when they set a department schedule and watch it be ignored.
A schedule must be at least an hour and is set in 15-minute increments, either Daily or as Weekday and Weekend. Outside the hours, agents signed in to Chat are set to Invisible and cannot change their own status: set it back to online and it flips straight back, so nobody can quietly stay available.
Two reasons a schedule appears not to work. Changes only take effect once agents sign out and back in, ending the session rather than closing the tab, so the afternoon you change it nothing looks different. And a department schedule with no department attached to it does nothing at all; each schedule needs at least one.
Where Chat hours and your Support schedule both exist, check they agree. Two sets of hours that disagree produce a customer told two different things on one site.
And do not treat operating hours as a lock. Zendesk notes that a visitor using custom JavaScript can in some cases get past them and reach an agent who is showing as Invisible. It is rare, and it explains a schedule that looks broken.
Three separate systems
Worth saying plainly: chat departments are not Support groups, chat triggers are not ticket triggers, and chat hours are not your Support schedule. Anything you configure in one has no effect in the others.
That duplication is one of the practical reasons teams consolidate onto messaging.
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