"How long is too long to leave a guest waiting?" and "how long do we keep a resolved chat on file?" are both policy questions — and both should have one clear answer a system enforces, not a rule each shift interprets differently. Ops Settings let a manager set both once.
A note on how Butler AI runs: hotels choose between AI Agent Mode (Butler AI handles guest messages and upselling automatically) and Human Agent Mode (your own staff or butlers manage every conversation, with AI support behind the scenes) — whichever fits how the property actually operates.
Ops rules that run themselves
This is manager territory, not admin territory — Ops Settings covers conversation SLA defaults and chat data retention, the two policies that decide how the desk actually behaves day to day, separate from staff roles and sign-in configuration.
Two thresholds, four numbers
The whole configuration is four numbers a manager sets directly: guest waiting threshold (minutes before a message counts as "guest waiting"), overdue threshold (minutes without a staff reply before it's overdue), notification deduplication (how long before a repeat alert is allowed), and — separately — how many days a completed chat stays read-only before it's permanently deleted. No code, no ticket to engineering.
Guest waiting, explained
Here's what that threshold actually does: Priya Shah's towel request starts a timer the moment she sends it. At 8 minutes elapsed, it crosses into "guest waiting" — not an alert yet, just a status the desk can see, so a slow reply gets flagged well before it becomes a real problem.
Overdue, explained
If nobody replies by 20 minutes, the same conversation crosses into overdue — the point where managers can actually get alerted. Notification deduplication matters here: it stops the same overdue conversation from buzzing a manager's phone every single minute it stays open, while still keeping the alert live.
What happens after the stay
Data retention runs on its own separate, equally explicit timeline. A resolved chat stays fully editable history at first — staff can still open and reference it in full — then, per the policy window a manager set, it becomes read-only, and eventually it's permanently deleted: messages and attachments removed, unrecoverable, aligned to your actual compliance requirements rather than an indefinite default.
Set once, and the desk stays honest — response thresholds enforced consistently across every shift, and guest data retained on a real compliance timeline instead of forever by default. See how it fits your hotel's policies at heybutler.io.