Setting up quiet times for communication channels

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This post applies to Realtime Marketing. The feature is available from release 1.1.35296.75 (December 2023), which should already be available to you. If not, you can manually update your Customer Insights – Journeys installation by going to Settings > Versions.

This feature provides the possibility to set up quiet times for your communication channels. This might be useful when you are dealing with holidays, but can also be used for weekends or other moments where you want to suppress your communication towards your customers.

For example, you might want to set up quiet times to prevent a commercial email from being sent during Remembrance Day. Or you might want to hold off on sending out commercial emails during the night.

Note that the message will be suppressed during your specified quiet times, but will be sent out when the quiet times have passed.

In this post we are going to set up a Quiet Time Setting based on the examples above, to prevent commercial emails from being sent out. To do this, we need the following:

  • A policy regarding the quiet times which you are going to set up (containing dates and/or hours when you don’t want to send out messages, if it only should be set up for commercial/transactional emails and for which compliance profiles they will be applied)
  • A Journey where we are sending out a message (email, push notification, SMS, custom channel)
    • Be aware that Quiet Times Settings will apply to the time zone set within the Journey. Always check if your time zone is set correctly!
  • A Compliance Profile (either the default one or your own created Compliance Profiles)

Setting up the Journey

For now I have set up a basic Journey, sending out an email to contacts when their agreement is about to expire.

The time zone (based on where I live) is set to (GMT+01:00) Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna. Again, this is important for your Quiet Time Setting to function correctly.

Setting up the Quiet Time Setting

To create a Quiet Time Setting, go to Settings > Customer engagement > Quiet time. From here, click the ‘+ New’ button to create a new Quiet Time Setting.

The ‘New Quiet Time Setting’ form opens. You can see that the form is divided into three sections:

  • Name
  • Weekly quiet hours (i.e. 00:00 – 06:00)
  • Quiet dates (i.e. 4th of May)

Both weekly quiet hours and quiet dates are divided in:

  • Commercial communication
  • Transactional communication

This means that you can set up for which purposes you want to set up quiet times. For example, you might want to send out order confirmations during the night (transactional), but do not want to send out a limited time agreement renewal offering (commercial).

As mentioned before, we are going to set up two moments for this Quiet Time Setting: Remembrance Day and overnight hours.

We click on the channel dropdown menu to select the applicable communication channel, for example email. You can create multiple channels within your Quiet Time Setting, such as email and SMS.

After that we can specify the quiet hours or dates.

After editing the settings, your Quiet Time Setting might look like this.

If you are happy with your configured quiet times, you can click ‘Save’. If this is your first time setting up a Quiet Time Setting, you will receive the following pop up.

When you select ‘Apply to all’, it applies the configured Quiet Time Setting to all your existing Journeys and messages. In this case we are going select this option.

When navigating to the Compliance Profile(s), it will show that your Quiet Time Setting has been applied to the Compliance Profile records.

Information about Compliance Profiles and Quiet Time Settings

As visible above, a Compliance Profile may contain a Quiet Time Setting. Since you can create multiple Compliance Profile records and multiple Quiet Time Setting records, you are able to distinguish based on region, regulations or other factors.

In this case I would suggest to create all Compliance Profiles first (so you know which regions or regulations you have to take into account), and afterwards create all Quiet Time Settings and applying them to the earlier created Compliance Profiles.

That’s it! Please let me know if you have any comments or feedback regarding this post!

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