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Everyone's hours, and no one's hours
A written coverage schedule for each person that the whole team can see, with the gaps where no one's covering clearly marked, and a decision made about who picks up what the bot hands off to a person while no one's covering.
By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026
Marta checks WhatsApp from 9 to 2. Diego, from 4 to 8pm. They're both so clear on it that they even wrote it on a piece of paper taped up by the register. But at 3:20pm a customer writes in wanting to talk to a person to change tomorrow's appointment. The bot does what it's supposed to do: it lets the customer know a person will get back to them, and stops writing in that conversation. No one sees it until 4:05pm, when Diego opens his phone and finds the message sitting there, cold, with the customer already checking out another salon.
This is the dropped ball from the first lesson in this course, but with a different cause. There, the problem was that everyone assumed someone else had it. Here it's different: no one was watching. The bot handed the conversation to a person, just like it should, but that person wasn't going to show up for another 45 minutes, and no one had decided who'd check WhatsApp in the meantime.
The problem isn't Marta's fault, or Diego's. The problem is that their schedule lives in both of their heads, and on a piece of paper that only says when each of them is on, not what happens in the two hours when neither one is. You can't fix it by hiring a third person to cover the gap, either, or by asking Marta to stay until four one random day: that works for a week and gets forgotten the next. Nor by asking someone to check their phone from home: outside of work hours, employees in Spain have a legal right to disconnect that protects their rest time, under Article 88 of Organic Law 3/2018. The fix is writing the schedule where the whole team can see it, gaps included, and deciding ahead of time what happens to whatever comes in while no one's covering.
- 09:00Marta starts checking WhatsApp. The slot is covered.
- 14:00Marta signs off. The gap begins, and for now nobody but her knows it.
- 15:20The customer asks to talk to someone to change tomorrow's appointment. The bot lets them know a person will respond, and stops writing.
- 16:00It's the hour when the paper by the register says Diego comes on shift.
- 16:05Diego actually opens his phone, five minutes late, and finds the cold message.
A schedule isn't a habit, it's a written rule
You know this from the lesson about whose turn it is with each customer, which conversation belongs to whom based on the topic. What's missing now is when it's each person's turn, because a customer doesn't pick the time they write in. The "whoever grabs it, has it" rule solves the problem while someone's on duty: it tells everyone else that message already has an owner. But it says nothing about the hours when no one's on duty, and that gap is exactly what swallowed the 3:20 message.
Write that down in the same place where you keep the assignments, a shared sheet the whole team checks before answering, not in your head: the time each person's coverage starts and ends, and also the hours when no one's covering. The gap between one shift and the next isn't an accident that fixes itself. It's a decision you make ahead of time, before the first message comes in during that window, not after the customer's already been waiting forty-five minutes.
That schedule is for the team, not for the bot, which does the same thing at 10am with Marta sitting right at the screen as it does at 3:20pm with no one around: it answers with your business info, like prices, hours, and policies, and takes bookings, which stay pending until someone from the business confirms them. If the customer asks to talk to a person or complains, it lets them know someone will respond, stops writing in that conversation, and the owner gets an email. That message to the customer is always the same, and it doesn't say what time. That's why the schedule needs to say who picks up those conversations, including the ones that land in a gap. And if someone on the team jumps into a conversation the bot is still answering, they pause it in that chat before writing, so the two of you don't both answer at once.
- 1Write down the real hours
If Marta doesn't actually check her phone until 9:30 even though the business opens at 9, write down 9:30. Diego from this chapter is the example: his schedule said 4pm, but he really opened WhatsApp at 4:05pm. And the wait costs you: in a study published in Harvard Business Review on 1.25 million inquiries from potential customers in the United States, companies that tried to respond within the first hour were nearly seven times more likely to actually connect with the customer than those that waited an hour longer. A message that comes in at 2pm, right as the gap starts, isn't seen by anyone on the team until after 4pm, more than two hours later. And an overly optimistic schedule is worse than no schedule at all: the team thinks someone's watching when no one is, and no one picks up what the bot hands off to a person in that window. - 2Mark the gap, don't leave it blank
If no one's covering between 2 and 4, write that down as no coverage, don't leave it blank. An unmarked gap is a gap you still haven't decided on, and no one's going to decide it for you when the message comes in. - 3Decide who picks up what comes in during that gap before the message arrives
Don't figure it out once the customer's already waiting, because by then you've already lost forty minutes. Figure it out once, when you build the schedule: whoever comes on after the gap starts with the conversations the bot handed off to a person while no one was around, before the new ones. That rule applies to every gap like it: lunchtime, the evening, all day Sunday.
- Takes the booking, which stays pending until someone from the business confirms it
- Gives a price if it's already set in your business info
- Answers the usual questions: hours, services, policies
- Works the same at three in the afternoon as at three in the morning
- When the customer asks to talk to someone or complains, the bot lets them know a person will respond and stops messaging
- That message is always the same, and it doesn't say what time
- The customer knows the message got through, not that it's been handled
Which one do I pick? You don't choose what the bot does at any given hour, it does the same thing every time. What you do choose is how much it can resolve on its own, because it answers using your business's own information: the more complete and up to date your prices, hours, and policies are, the more questions it closes out without anyone stepping in. It's the same list you wrote in the lesson about what the bot never lets go of, the one that holds no matter what's happening with your team. And you choose who picks up whatever needs a person to decide, a complaint, a change that throws off the schedule, a special price, that's set by your schedule. The longer the gap, like overnight or a whole weekend, the more both things matter, because nobody's staying up waiting for you to open.
- Every person's coverage hours are written down where the whole team can see them, with the real hours they check WhatsApp, not the hours you'd like them to be
- For every gap with no one covering, it's already decided who will pick up, once they're back, whatever the bot has handed off to a person in the meantime
- Shifts touch each other; they don't overlap
- The rules for who covers what and when are written down where the whole team can see them; the next lesson puts them to the test with a real message, hour by hour
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. A shop says in its hours that it opens at nine, but the owner doesn't actually check WhatsApp until nine forty, almost every day. What hour do you write down in the coverage schedule?
Nine forty, even though that means admitting to forty minutes with no coverage every morning. An overly optimistic schedule makes the team believe someone's watching when they're not, and whatever the bot hands off to a person during those forty minutes goes unanswered, like the 3:20 p.m. message.
2. On a Sunday afternoon, with the store closed and no one on call, a customer writes in to complain that their order arrived incomplete. What happens to that message, and what do you need to have already decided?
The bot doesn't try to solve it: faced with a complaint, it lets the customer know a person will get back to them and stops writing in that conversation. That's the right call, because a complaint needs a person to decide on a refund or a replacement, and promising one you can't deliver is worse than not answering at all. What you need to have already decided is who picks it up first thing Monday, before the new messages, and that they start by apologizing for the wait.
3. The owner wants Marta covering until 3:00 p.m. and Diego starting at 2:00 p.m., so that if Marta runs late one day, Diego's already watching WhatsApp. Is that a good way to write the schedule?
No: that overlap repeats the same stepping-on-each-other's-toes problem from the first lesson, with two people reading the same message. Shifts should meet, not overlap, and the one day Marta runs late is handled by naming her backup for that specific day, not by doubling up coverage every day.
With coverage hours assigned and the gaps decided, what's left is to put it all together, who covers and when, in the order it applies, and test it with a real message to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Sources
- The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, and David Elkington, Harvard Business Review, 2011.
- Organic Law 3/2018, of December 5, on the Protection of Personal Data and the Guarantee of Digital Rights (Article 88). Boletín Oficial del Estado (Spain's Official State Gazette), 2018.
In Yodai the WhatsApp bot answers with your prices and your hours, and hands the chat over when someone asks for a person. See how the WhatsApp bot for your business works.
NextRules in place, tested with a real message