Active Hours
You decide when the bot is allowed to respond to clients. In the current version of Remo, active hours are controlled in two ways: through the AI prompts you write, and through the scheduling availability you configure for in-person meetings.
There is no clock that switches the bot off. If a client writes at 3am, the bot replies at 3am. The per-client respond between fields you'll see in the interface are stored and displayed, but they are not enforced — do not rely on them to keep the bot quiet overnight. Prompt-based hours are the honest way to shape how the bot behaves outside business hours.
What Is Actually Time-Limited
Two things in Remo genuinely respect a clock, and neither of them is the reply to an inbound message:
- Follow-ups run between 09:00 and 22:00 project time — a follow-up that comes due outside that window waits until the window opens again. It is never dropped, so nobody falls through the cracks overnight. See Follow-up Messages
- Bookings only land inside your configured availability — the scheduling windows you set per location, described below
Everything else — answering questions, sending photos, searching the catalog, handing off to an agent — happens whenever the client writes.
Through the AI Prompts
The most direct way to make the bot respect your business hours is to tell it. In Advanced → AI System Prompts, include the hours and an instruction in your Behavior prompt or Project characteristics:
"You are available Monday to Saturday, 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM (local time). If a client messages outside these hours, acknowledge the message warmly, let them know your team will follow up during business hours, and offer to schedule a meeting. Do not promise immediate human assistance overnight."
Adding the hours as a Project characteristic makes them easy to update without rewriting the whole prompt. The AI uses characteristics as background context on every reply.
The bot can read each message in context. A client saying "hi, can you help tomorrow morning?" at 11pm on a Tuesday should get a different reply than a client saying "this is urgent" — and an AI prompt handles that nuance better than a fixed time-of-day rule.
Through Scheduling Availability
Even though the bot answers messages 24/7, bookings only happen on the days and time windows you've configured for each location in Configuration → Scheduling. The bot will:
- Offer slots that fall within an open window
- Decline (gracefully) when a client asks for a slot that isn't open
- Use the location's timezone for all calculations
So even with no explicit "active hours" UI, your scheduling configuration acts as a guardrail for one of the most important client interactions.
Out-of-Hours Replies
Combining the two approaches gives you a clean experience:
- The bot replies anytime, but with the tone and content you've described in the prompt
- Bookings are only offered for genuinely available windows
- Clients always feel heard, even when no human is awake to take over
Per-Client Overrides
If a specific contact needs different treatment — a VIP who must be replied to immediately at any hour, or a contact the bot should stop replying to entirely — you can:
- Toggle AI off for that contact and have an agent handle them personally
- Mark them as a Contractor so they go straight to an agent
- Assign them directly to a specific agent
These are the controls that actually change the bot's behavior for one person. The per-client hour fields do not. See Client Settings for details.
Timezone
Each scheduling location has its own timezone, configured in Configuration → Scheduling. The bot interprets bookings in that timezone, regardless of where the client is. Follow-up quiet hours use your project's time, not the client's.