Customer success teams · Intercom · CS operations

How can I make people only enter an Intercom Series on a workday?

By BREME · Updated 3 November 2026

Who this is for: Customer success and onboarding teams at B2B software companies who run onboarding or check-in Series in Intercom and don't want customers getting a nudge, or waiting out a three day deadline, over a weekend when nobody on either side is working.

Why this question keeps coming up

B2B customers mostly use your product on workdays. If a Series says come back within three days and someone signs up on a Friday, two of those three days are a weekend, and the follow up lands before they have had a real chance to try anything. Or a check-in email arrives at 9am Saturday and sits under a pile of newsletters by Monday.

People have asked Intercom about this in the community for years. In 2022 an Intercom support engineer confirmed that Series can't currently account for business days, and suggested putting the schedule on the email step itself instead. The idea of a wait until business hours option has also been raised for Intercom Workflows and is listed as a feature request, not a feature.

What you can and can't control

Intercom's Series builder article describes two Wait block conditions: Wait until a period of time, and Wait until specific date. Neither knows about weekends. Rules blocks can wait too, with Try to match for a set time, but that time is also counted in calendar time.

What you can control is when each message is allowed to send. Every message block in a Series has a Scheduling option, which shows Any day, any time by default. Intercom's Series FAQs say the Series will wait for office hours to start before sending the message, even if the customer matches early. So the practical answer is: let people enter and move through the Series whenever they match, and stop the messages themselves from going out outside your working week.

• Entry: customers enter when they match the Entry Rules, checked about once an hour, or straight away for people active in your app with the Messenger installed.
• Waits: count calendar time, so plan for weekends when you choose the length.
• Messages: can be held to office hours or to custom days and times, and wait for that window to open.
• Recurring entry: a fixed schedule can let customers re-enter on set dates, such as every week on Monday, but it isn't available for event triggers.

Step by step in Intercom

1. Check your workspace office hours first: go to Settings > Workspace > Office Hours and set your working days and times in your workspace timezone.
2. Open the Series and click the first message block after your Entry Rules.
3. Find the Scheduling setting, which reads Any day, any time by default, and change it to send during office hours, or to custom times with only Monday to Friday selected.
4. Repeat this for every message block in the Series. Each message has its own setting, so one missed block will still send on a Saturday.
5. Look at each message block's send window, for example Wait up to 30d. Make it long enough to cover a weekend plus the time the customer needs to come online, or they will leave the path.
6. Review your Wait blocks. If a gap was meant as three working days, a calendar wait of three days plus weekday-only messages is usually close enough; for a gap that must never be short, use five days.
7. Check your Entry Rules. If the Series starts from an event trigger, consider switching to an audience rule, such as an attribute or a signed up date, so customers who match on a weekend are still picked up when the schedule opens.
8. Set the Series live and check after the first weekend that nothing went out between Friday evening and Monday morning.

The event trigger trap

This is the part most teams miss. Intercom's scheduling article says that if an event happens outside the schedule, the message is not sent for that event. It isn't held until the schedule opens, and that applies to Series steps triggered by an event too.

So if your onboarding Series is triggered by an event like completed setup and you restrict it to weekdays, anyone who completes setup on a Sunday may never get that message. Intercom suggests three ways around it: keep the schedule at any day, any time for messages that must always send, send the event from your own system only during your chosen hours, or target the audience with rules instead of events. Audience based messages are checked again later and send once the schedule opens, if the person still matches.

Time zones for an Australian team

Intercom's help docs say emails scheduled to office hours use your workspace timezone, even for recipients somewhere else. Emails scheduled with custom times use each recipient's timezone when Intercom knows it, and your workspace timezone when it doesn't. Chats and posts use your app's timezone.

If your customers are all in Australia, office hours set to your own city is the simplest choice. If you sell into New Zealand, Asia or the US as well, custom weekday times are better, because each customer gets the message in their own working day rather than yours.

Series: [name]
Entry: [audience rule, not an event, if steps are weekday only]
Workspace timezone: [e.g. Australia/Brisbane]

Block | Type | Wait or window | Scheduling
1 | Message: [welcome] | Wait up to [7d] | [Office hours / Any day, any time]
2 | Wait | [3 days, counts weekends] | n/a
3 | Rules: [has done key action] | Try to match for [5 days] | n/a
4 | Message: [nudge] | Wait up to [7d] | [Mon to Fri, 9am to 4pm custom]

Messages that must always send (receipts, access, security): [list], left on Any day, any time
Checked after first weekend by: [name], on [date]

Subject: Picking up where you left off with [product]

Hi [first name],

You made a start on [product] last week, and the next step is [key action, e.g. connecting your calendar]. It takes about [time] and it's the step that makes [outcome they signed up for] work.

Here's the direct link: [link]

If something got in the way, reply to this email and tell me what it was. I read every reply and I'm around [your working hours, timezone].

[CSM name]
[Company name] | [contact details]