Set the weekly schedule your team actually works, and let the agent keep answering through every night and weekend. Business hours here decide who replies, a person or the agent, never whether a customer gets help at all.
Can I still change the address on order #4192?
Most tools treat after-hours as a dead zone where customers hit a wall and wait until morning. Here the agent is on every hour of every day, so a question at midnight on a Sunday is answered as fully as one at noon on a Tuesday. Business hours never decide whether a customer gets help, only whether the help comes from a person or from the agent working on its own.
Do you ship to Canada?
You lay out a normal week once: which days your team is on, and the hours they cover on each of them. That weekly schedule is what business hours mean here, the window when a human is available behind the agent, repeating the same way every week. It is the one thing the rest of the support tools read to know whether a person can be pulled in right now or not.
When your team is off, nothing about the customer experience goes quiet. The agent keeps doing the full job it always does: answering questions, booking, qualifying, moving things forward, with no auto-reply telling people to come back tomorrow. The customer who reaches you on a Saturday night gets a real conversation, not a closed sign, and only the handful of things that truly need a person wait.
Can I book a Monday install slot?
Now and then a request genuinely needs someone on your team, and that is the only time hours change what a customer is told. Reading the schedule you set, the agent says plainly when the next person will be available rather than leaving anyone guessing, and it lines the request up so whoever comes on walks straight into it. The customer leaves knowing what happens next and when.
I need to dispute a charge from last month. Can a person look into it?
The customer leaves knowing what happens next, and when.
Set the week your team works, let the agent answer in full through every off hour, and have it tell anyone who needs a person exactly when one returns. Coverage that never hands a customer a closed sign.