Live chat support has evolved into one of the most essential customer support service channels in today's rapidly evolving digital environment where users/customers expect instant and efficient assistance.

In its 2025 analysis, Sprinklr reports that 73% of customers find live chat to be the most satisfying way to engage with businesses. Having said that, in numerous business environments, users often need 24/7 support while technicians are usually available only during standard operational hours. Hence, clearly outlining live chat hours helps build trust, ease user/customer concerns and streamline support interactions.

We introduced an enhancement to the Live Chat feature allowing to enable live chat exclusively during operational hours.

See the screenshots below for an illustration of how it functions when this option is enabled.

During operational hours:

During non-operational hours:

The "Need Technician Assistance" option will be unavailable. However, users can still perform key actions as shown in the screenshot above, allowing technicians to address them once they are available. To use Ask GPT, ensure that your ServiceDesk Plus is integrated with ChatGPT.

Please note that the enhancement to restrict Live Chat availability to operational hours was introduced in build 14930. If you are using an older build of ServiceDesk Plus, we recommend upgrading to build 14930 or later to avail this feature.