Ramadan and holiday hours in customer chat: a checklist

Why holidays break customer chat

Most chat mistakes in holiday periods are not slow replies; they are wrong information. The website says 9:00 to 21:00, the chat greeting says "we reply until 22:00", and the branch actually closes at 17:00 before reopening late in the evening. A customer who trusted the greeting turns up to a closed door. The fix is to treat changed hours as a small project with a start date, an owner and an end date.

The checklist, one week before

Sample wording

Welcome message, Ramadan

• "Ramadan Kareem! During Ramadan we answer chats 10:00 to 16:00 and 20:00 to 01:00. Ask about bookings, prices or delivery."
• "رمضان كريم! خلال شهر رمضان نرد على الدردشة من 10:00 إلى 16:00 ومن 20:00 إلى 01:00."

Welcome message, Eid closure

• "Eid Mubarak! We're closed for Eid and back on [date] at 10:00. Leave your question and we'll reply here then."
• "عيد مبارك! نحن في إجازة العيد ونعود يوم [التاريخ] الساعة 10:00. اترك سؤالك وسنرد عليك هنا."

Standard answer, delivery cut-off

• "Orders placed before [date] arrive before Eid. Orders after that are delivered from [date]."

Use real dates, not "after the holiday". Holiday dates can move by a day depending on the moon sighting; when that happens, update the messages the same day, and say "expected" where the date is not yet fixed.

Plan the rota for the new peak

Ramadan often moves customer activity later into the evening, and the days before Eid can be the busiest of the year for salons, shops and car-rental desks. Look at when chats arrived during the same period last year, if you have the history, and put your strongest people on those hours. Write the holiday rota down with names, and agree who owns unassigned chats in each new shift. How a small team handles a chat rush covers the busiest evenings.

Keep everything saying the same thing

The most useful habit is to change the facts in one place and let everything else point to it.

In StayReplied, documents and price records are drafted, reviewed and published, with every version kept and the option to roll back, as the docs describe. Publish a "Ramadan hours" version of your opening-hours answer, and after the holiday roll back to the previous version instead of retyping it. The website chat widget, listed as available now on the integrations page, has a welcome message for English and one for Arabic, so you change two short fields. It has no business-hours setting today, so the welcome message is where holiday hours must appear (out-of-hours chat messages explains the overnight routine). The widget, knowledge versions and rollback are on every plan (pricing).

If you use AI replies (no plan includes AI today; they need your own Anthropic key), the AI answers only from published knowledge, so publishing the holiday hours is what keeps it from quoting normal hours. When two published facts disagree, for example an old and a new hours document, it does not pick one: it hands off and creates a task for your team. Delete or roll back the old version rather than leaving both.

On the first day back

• Roll back the opening-hours answer to the normal version.
• Restore the normal welcome messages (ten everyday examples).
• Read the conversations from the holiday period in the unified inbox and answer anything still waiting, oldest first.
• Note what customers asked most during the holiday, and save it for next year's checklist.

Mistakes to avoid

• Changing the website but not the chat. Customers read the greeting, not your footer.
• "Back after the holiday." Give the date.
• Forgetting to switch back. The calendar reminder is the most important row in the table.
• One language only. Update the Arabic and English versions together.

When this is not for you

If your business keeps the same hours all year, this is a one-line change to your welcome message on the days you close. And if most of your customers write on WhatsApp, update your WhatsApp greeting there too; in StayReplied, web chat is the channel you connect today and WhatsApp is coming soon. Who StayReplied is for describes the teams it fits today.