Nobody is on shift. Then what?

• Someone is available. The AI hands over — "I've looped in the team so a person can continue from here.", or on newer accounts the warmer "Let me grab a teammate who can take this further — they'll jump in here shortly." Either way the conversation switches to human mode and your team is pinged.
• Nobody is available. The AI does not hand over into an empty room. It says "Our team isn't available right now. Leave your email and we'll get back to you within 24 hours." and asks for an email address, which lands in your leads.
• The customer asks for a person outright. That is always honoured — we escalate whether or not anybody is around, because the customer said what they wanted. This is the case where the setup gap below matters.

The AI also does not go quiet after handing off. If it was the AI's own uncertainty that triggered the escalation and nobody is available, the AI keeps answering rather than dropping the customer into silence. The offer of a person is made once per conversation, not on every message.

Closing it takes two things

• A member with a mobile inbox. Someone has to have linked their phone. See mobile inbox — Telegram is the fastest.
• The channel itself connected on your account. Registering a member's personal address only says where to deliver. The message still needs a sender — your own connected Telegram or WhatsApp under Channels. Without one, every alert to that address is dropped.

If you are a one-person business, this is the whole job: link your own Telegram once and you are permanently the fallback, because owners are always treated as on duty.

One practical consequence: a member who has linked a mobile inbox counts as available from that moment, and stays that way until they sign out of the portal. So the AI will offer a person rather than a callback — and it is theworking-hours schedule that stops the ping arriving at two in the morning. If you want quiet nights, set hours; do not rely on being "offline".

What the grid supports

• A day with no windows is a day off. Turn the day off and nothing is routed to that person then.
• Up to six windows in a day — enough for a lunch break, or a split shift.
• Overnight shifts work. A window like 22:00 to 06:00 is read as spanning midnight, not as an error.
• Times are 24-hour, and the last minute of the day is 23:59.
• An empty custom schedule collapses back to always-on rather than making someone unreachable by accident. If a schedule is ever unreadable, we treat the member as on duty. We would rather ping someone at the wrong hour than lose a customer's enquiry.

If you run more than one website, the Domain assignment card on the same member page limits who hears about which site. Nothing checked means "handles all domains", which is the default. Owners hear about all of them regardless. It is worth knowing because it is the second half of the "nobody was notified" message: everyone on shift may still be assigned to a different domain than the one the customer is on.

• "Customers say they asked for a person and nobody replied." Check your dashboard alert feed and the email on your account for a delivery-failure alert. If one is there, it names the cause. If there is none, the ping was delivered and the question is who received it.
• "I set hours but I am still pinged at midnight." Are you the owner? Owners bypass working hours by design. The card says so on the screen. Add a non-owner member for out-of-hours quiet, or accept the pings.
• "I set hours and now I get nothing at all." Check the timezone on the member, then the team default. A schedule in the wrong zone can be off by hours. Also check that the day is actually turned on — a day with no window is a day off.
• "The AI offers a callback even during our shift." Availability, not hours, drives that choice. Somebody needs the Agent Portal open, or a linked mobile inbox. If we cannot read your team's availability for any reason we assume nobody is there and collect an email — deliberately, because an over-collected email costs you nothing and a missed enquiry costs you a customer.
• "Alerts arrive on Telegram but never on WhatsApp." That is usually WhatsApp's own 24-hour rule rather than anything about shifts. See WhatsApp troubleshooting.
• Still unclear? Email support@orcalinq.com with the date and time a customer asked for a person, and which member should have been on shift. With those two facts we can say exactly which check refused.