Question handling
Answering when are you open, correctly, every time
This is the most answerable question in support and the one most often wrong on the internet. The base hours are rarely the problem. The problem is the bank holiday nobody updated, the winter timetable still showing in June, and the map listing that disagrees with the website, which is what people actually check.
What they are really asking
Can I come or call right now, or at the specific time I am thinking of.
- what time do you open
- are you open today
- are you open on sunday
- what are your bank holiday hours
- what time do you close
- are you open over christmas
- whats the last appointment of the day
- do you close for lunch
- are you open now
- which branch is open latest
The material that answers it
An assistant is only as good as the document behind it, and for this question the document usually exists but is written in the wrong shape. What each one has to contain to be answerable:
| One hours page you actually maintain | Not a copy in a document, not a line in a footer, not four places that drift apart. Point the assistant at the page you update, so the answer changes when you change the page rather than when somebody remembers to re-upload something. |
|---|---|
| The exceptions, written as dated entries | Public holidays, closures, staff training days, seasonal timetables. These are the actual question, because base hours are usually already known. A dated list is easy to keep and easy to match against. |
| The difference between open and available | Last orders, last appointment, kitchen closing, counter closing early on a delivery day, the desk that is only staffed in the mornings. Somebody arriving twenty minutes before you lock the door and being turned away is worse than being told you were closed. |
| Per site hours where you have more than one | Each location named the way customers name it, with its own hours and its own exceptions. A single set of hours across several sites is wrong somewhere, and the assistant will confidently repeat it. |
| What is reachable when the doors are shut | Phone lines with different hours, an emergency route, online ordering that never closes. Closed is rarely the whole answer and the rest of it is usually useful. |
How to handle it
Answer the exception, not the timetable
Almost nobody asks what your hours are in the abstract. They ask about today, or about a specific day they are planning around, and that day is disproportionately likely to be a holiday or a weekend.
So the material has to lead with exceptions rather than treat them as footnotes. A regular timetable with an unlisted holiday behind it produces a confident wrong answer to the most consequential version of this question.
Avoid answering are you open right now as though it were now
The assistant does not have a reliable sense of the current time in your customer's location, and a reply saying yes we are open right now is a claim it cannot support.
The safe shape is to give the hours for the day asked about and let the person compare. It reads as helpful rather than evasive, and it never produces the answer that sends somebody to a locked door.
Separate open from serving
Last orders, final appointment, last collection, a counter that closes before the shop does. These are the details that decide whether a journey is worth making, and they are almost never on the hours page.
Adding them costs a paragraph and removes a category of complaint that is entirely about expectations.
Name the site in the answer
Where you have more than one location the assistant should always say which one it is answering about, even when only one was mentioned. Ambiguity here converts directly into a wasted trip.
If somebody asks generally, the useful reply names the sites and their hours rather than picking one.
When it stops being an answer
Whether somebody can still be seen or served today
This is a question about capacity, not about hours. Whether there is a slot, whether the kitchen will take another order, whether the queue is manageable. Nobody can answer that from a document and it needs the phone.
Closures that have not been published yet
Weather, an incident, staff sickness, an unplanned closure this afternoon. The assistant will keep answering from the timetable because that is all it has. If you close unexpectedly, update the page you maintain, because that is where the answers come from.
Access arrangements outside normal hours
Early collections, out of hours pickups, an appointment before opening. These are arrangements rather than facts, and they need somebody who can agree to them.
How this one goes wrong
The wrong closing time
It sounds trivial and it is the most damaging error in this family, because the customer acts on it physically. They travel. They arrive to a locked door, having been told by your own website that you were open, and there is nothing you can do about it afterwards.
It is also the easiest to prevent, and the prevention is not technical. Keep one hours page, put the exceptions on it, update it before the holiday rather than during it, and make sure it agrees with your map listing, because a visitor who sees two different answers will believe whichever one is worse for you.
The same question, trade by trade
The pattern above holds everywhere. The wording, the escalation line and the material behind it do not, so there is a page per trade.
- For a dental clinicA practice runs sessions, not office hours. What to publish about the lunchtime gap, hygienist days and the Saturday list.
- For a medical practiceBranch times, training closures and the gap between the doors opening and the phones being answered at a practice.
- For a veterinary clinicA practice can be staffed while it is closed to consults. What to publish about session times, theatre mornings and the out of hours handover.
- For a physiotherapy clinicEarly and late clinics, rehab gym hours, and the practitioner who is only in on a Tuesday. Answering hours honestly.
- For a opticianThe shop trades all day and the test room runs a booked list. What to publish so nobody travels in on the wrong day.
- For a pharmacyLunchtime closures, bank holidays and dispensing cut offs. Why a wrong closing time costs somebody their evening.
- For a law firmReception opens before fee earners are at their desks, court takes a solicitor out for a day, and completion day runs on a banking deadline.
- For a accounting firmReception hours are the easy half. What to publish about the weeks nobody can come to the phone and the payroll cut off that never moves.
- For a insurance brokerThe office opens at nine, but nothing goes on risk until an insurer is open, and the claims line keeps hours the broker does not set.
- For a mortgage brokerAdvisers take evening calls after the lender desks have shut, and products get withdrawn overnight. An hours page here runs on two clocks.
- For a estate agencyBranch hours, viewing hours and the emergency line are three different timetables, and the one people want is rarely the office one.
- For a recruitment agencyA shift starts before the office opens and the cut off falls at the weekend. Which times a recruitment site actually needs to publish.
- For a marketing agencyThe office closes at six. The spend does not. What to publish about cover, reporting days, and who is watching a live account overnight.
- For a fashion retailerThree sets of hours and only one is on the door. Fitting rooms close first, and the collection point often closes before the tills do.
- For a furniture retailerThe showroom, the collection bay and the delivery crews run on different clocks, and the busiest selling days are the ones nothing moves.
- For a electronics retailerThe repair counter closes before the doors do, and the maker's own line often runs longer than both. Say all three or the trip is wasted.
- For a garden centreHours move with the season, the cafe keeps its own, and December is not a normal month. Three answers behind one question.
- For a bike shopTwo sets of hours in one building. The counter closes later than the workshop takes bikes in. Winter hours and the weekday closure.
- For a restaurantThe door being open and the kitchen serving are two different times, and most restaurant sites publish only one of them.
- For a gymThe door works at five in the morning and the desk is empty until seven. Three sets of times behind one question about opening.
- For a salon or spaThe last slot for a service is set backwards from closing, the salon is open longer than any one stylist works, and Monday is often shut.
- For a universityThe library, the department office and the service desk keep three sets of hours, and every one of them changes in vacation. What to index.
- For a private schoolThe junior day and the senior day end at different times, and a question asked in August is about the office rather than the school.
- For a driving schoolEvenings, weekends and the after school slot everyone wants. What to publish when there is no counter and nobody free to answer.
- For a plumbing and heating firmThe office phone, the last hour an engineer will start a job and the overnight rota all stop at three different times.
- For a electrical contractorThe phone is answered until five. A job that turns the supply off cannot start at three, and a test may only run when a building is empty.
- For a removals companyThe office answers on weekdays. Crews load first thing and work Saturdays, and a storage warehouse keeps different hours again.
- For a car dealershipThe showroom can be open on a Sunday with the workshop shut. One set of hours produces somebody standing at a locked service door.
Questions
- Will it know today's date and whether we are open?
- Do not rely on it. Configure the material and your fallback so it answers with the hours for the day being asked about rather than asserting the current state. That answer is always correct and it is what the visitor needs anyway.
- How do we stop holiday hours going stale?
- Index by crawling the page you maintain rather than uploading a copy. A crawl follows your sitemap and obeys your robots rules, so the assistant reads what is currently published rather than a file from three months ago.
- We have several branches. How should the material be organised?
- One clearly headed section per site, each naming the branch the way customers do. Answers cite the passage they matched, so a per-branch structure also makes it obvious when a reply has come from the wrong location.
- Is this worth automating at all?
- It is one of the highest volume questions any local business gets, and it is entirely answerable. The value is not sophistication, it is removing an interruption that happens every day and getting it right on the days when it matters most.
Keep reading
- Handling order statusThe most asked question in retail support and the one a document-based assistant cannot answer. What it can do instead, and where handover sits.
- Handling shipping and deliveryCut-off times, zones, timescales, public holidays and duties on international orders. The material exists on most sites, it is just buried.
- Handling returns and exchangesWindow, condition, who pays postage, exclusions. Faulty and unwanted are two different processes with two different sets of rights.
- Every question typeHandling patterns for the questions every support inbox gets.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.