Automatic Activation Rules

You can find this section under Live Chat > Automatic Activation Rules in the IRP Admin left navigation menu.

This section allows you to automatically enable and disable Live Chat via a set of rules, such as day of the week, time of day and whether Live Chat should be disabled or enabled at these specific times.

When you set these rules and enable the Use Automatic Activation Rules Application Setting, the Live Chat feature will automatically become activated or deactivated based on the current time and how the time corresponds to the set Activation Rules.

Note that rules cannot overlap with one another and Admin Users should treat the earliest day of the week as Monday and work forward from there. This means that rules with an Activation Day of Sunday cannot have a Deactivation Day other than Sunday.

Live Chat functionality will be automatically hidden on the front end (without the necessity of the page being refreshed) when Activation Rules are enabled and the current time passes the End Date of the active Activation Rule.

• If you disable the use of Automatic Activation Rules, the Enable Live Support setting will remain as what it was at the time of disabling the rules. Therefore if you want to totally disable Live Chat, you need to uncheck the Enable Live Support setting.
• Conversely, if you disable Live Chat at a time when Automatic Activation Rules are enabled, the Automatic Activation Rules will also be disabled. If you subsequently want to re-enable Live Chat, you should either:
  • Enable Live Chat using the Enable Live Support setting and also enable Automatic Activation Rules.
  • Enable Automatic Activation Rules again - this will determine what status Live Chat should have, based on the existing rules.

When Live Chat is manually disabled or enabled while Activation Rule scheduling is in place, the 'Live Support Use Automatic Activation Rules' Application Setting will not be toggled off automatically. Instead, the IRP will determine the next time an Activation Rule should be used and instead schedule that rule and use the manually-toggled Live Support setting value until then.

For example, if the Live Chat is scheduled to activate at 9am and deactivate at 5pm Mon-Fri, and is toggled on at 8:30am, the Live Chat functionality will follow set scheduling, remaining enabled from being manually toggled at 8:30am until its scheduled deactivation time of 5pm. Inversely, if the Live Chat is toggled off at 4:30pm, before its scheduled 5pm scheduled deactivation time, the Live Chat will remain deactivated until 9am the next day, when it will be activated according to the set schedule.

Note: if an Activation Rule has been 'snoozed', any changes to the scheduling via Activation Rule updates will cause the Live Chat to fall back into regular scheduling.

The main LiveSupportAutomaticActivationRules.aspx page appears as follows:

At the top of the page you can see that you can search for active, inactive or all rules. The following details are shown in the main grid:

• ID: This is the unique ID of the rule, created automatically by the IRP.
• Active: This indicates whether or not the rule is active on your system. If it is not active, the rule will not be enforced for customers. If you make any changes here, click the Update All Activation Rules button.
• Activate: This shows the day and time when the rule is activated. If you make any changes here, click the Update All Activation Rules button.
• Deactivate: This shows the day and time when the rule is deactivated. If you make any changes here, click the Update All Activation Rules button.
• Date Created: This shows the day, date and time when the rule was created.
• Delete checkbox: Check this box if you want to delete a rule and then click the Delete Selected Activation Rules button.

For more details, see How To Add or Edit Automatic Activation Rules in this section.