Custom Greeting Message When Away

Last verified: October 9, 2026

What You Can Now Do

Context Memo now lets you set a separate greeting message in the call widget that displays when your office hours indicate you're away. The widget reads your configured office hours and swaps the copy automatically, so a visitor who lands on your site at 11pm sees a message written for 11pm instead of the one written for a staffed desk. The decision this changes: you no longer have to write one greeting that hedges for every hour of the week. Write the open-hours greeting for a live conversation, and write the away greeting to set an expectation about response time.

Where It Is in Context Memo

The away greeting lives in your call widget configuration, in the same section as your office hours settings. That screen now shows two greeting fields instead of one: the greeting shown during office hours, and the away greeting shown outside them. Office hours remain the single input that controls which one renders, so if you haven't set hours yet, the widget behaves exactly as it did before and only the standard greeting is used.

How to Use It

1. Open your call widget configuration and confirm your office hours are set, including the correct time zone. The widget uses these hours to decide which greeting to show, so an unset or wrong time zone will keep callers on the standard greeting.
2. Enter your away greeting in the new field. Keep it short and specific: acknowledge that no one is available, and state when you will respond. A caller reading "We're closed until 9am ET and will reply to messages first thing" behaves differently than one reading a generic welcome line.
3. Review your existing greeting with the away version now in place. Most greetings written before this release were compromises covering both states. Tighten the open-hours copy for a live answer.
4. Save, then load your site outside your configured hours and open the widget. You should see the away greeting. Load it during hours and you should see the standard one.
5. If your site serves buyers across regions, check the away greeting against the time zone you configured. The switch is based on your business hours, not the visitor's local clock.

Why We Built It

Customers told us the widget showed the same greeting whether they were open or closed. A caller arriving at 2am got the same invitation to talk as a caller arriving at 2pm, then waited for a response that wasn't coming until morning. The cost was a bad first impression at the exact moment someone was interested enough to reach out, and support inboxes full of follow-ups from people who assumed they'd been ignored. Acknowledging unavailability is cheaper than explaining it later.

What It Does Not Do Yet

This release adds one away greeting per widget. There's no per-day variation, so if your Saturday coverage differs from your Tuesday evening coverage, the same away message covers both. Holidays and one-off closures are not handled separately either. To close for a day that falls inside your normal hours, adjust the office hours for that date, and the widget will serve the away greeting. The feature changes the greeting copy only; it does not change routing, queueing, or what happens after a caller submits a message.