Time-based greetings for morning, midday and evening

A cheerful “Good morning!” at 8 a.m. lands differently than the same standard message at 10 p.m. With time-based welcome messages, your agent greets callers to match the time of day – automatically, with no switching on your part. If a call falls within a time window you've defined, that window's message replaces the default greeting. Combined with the weekday selection, there's even more to it: a test lab for finding out which greeting works best with your callers.

How to set it up

1. Open your agent and go to the Greeting (“Begrüßung”) tab.
2. Scroll to the Time-based welcome messages (“Zeitabhängige Willkommensnachrichten”) section and click + Time window (“+ Zeitfenster”).
3. Set the times from – to (e.g. 06:00 – 09:30) and write the message for this window, such as: “Good morning! I'm Ana, the AI assistant for …” [Screenshot: time window 06:00–09:30 with a morning greeting and weekday selection]
4. Optional: Choose the Weekdays (Mon–Sun) the window should apply to. No selection means the window applies every day.
5. Add more windows as needed – say, 17:00 – 23:00 for the evening – and click Save (“Speichern”).

Advanced: A/B test your greetings

The weekday selection turns your time windows into a test matrix: same time window, different weekday, different wording. For example, set up the same daily windows for Monday and Tuesday (06:00–08:59, 09:00–10:59, 11:00–13:59 …), but with different variants – “Good morning, I'm …” on Mondays, “Hi there, this is …” on Tuesdays. Each caller hears exactly one variant, and you collect comparison data without ever switching anything.

Worth varying: the salutation (Hi / Hello / Good morning), the reassurance (“You don't have to hang up – just talk to me like you would to a person”) and the wording of the recording notice – as a casual announcement or a polite question (“May I record and transcribe this call?”).

You analyze the results by hand, but it's quick: in the Call log (“Anrufe”), compare the abgebrochener_anruf tags and call durations for each weekday; the content search shows how callers respond to specific wording.

Real-world example

A colleague on the Callana team uses his personal agent as an ongoing experiment: the agent picks up whenever he can't, and each weekday has the same daily windows, each with slightly different wording – from the salutation to the recording question. After two weeks, the hang-up patterns and conversation transcripts clearly showed which variants kept callers relaxed and talking – and the winning wording became the new default greeting. Effort: set it up once, then just read the results.

Where: AI Telephony (“KI-Telefonie”) → Agents (“Agenten”) → choose an agent → Greeting tab

Good to know

• Outside all time windows, your default welcome message applies automatically – you don't need to create a “rest of the day” window.
• Test cleanly: Change only one thing per variant if you can. And keep in mind that weekdays differ systematically (Monday callers aren't Saturday callers) – rotating over two or three weeks makes the results reliable.
• EU AI Act / GDPR: Mention in every greeting variant that the call is handled by an AI and recorded – the input field in the Greeting tab reminds you. It's easy to miss when you're testing lots of variants.
• A classic that works well, too: mention same-day openings in the morning and online booking in the evening – and on your day off, the weekday selection simply lets the default greeting take over.
• Vacation periods have their own option: under Business closure (“Betriebsurlaub”), you can set entire date ranges with their own message – and the AI automatically gets the closure context for the conversation.

Last updated July 16, 2026