topic Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply in Tickets & Conversations

Out of office / after hours auto reply

anjeho — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 22:04:15 GMT

Does HubSpot not have any way to create an out of office / after hours auto reply to Inbox conversations? (Or tickets auto-created from those conversations.)

Like: "Thanks for the email, we're open these hours and will get back to you then." (please don't send us 5 more emails every 5 minutes) or "Thanks for the email, we're closed for Christmas and will get back to you December 26."

Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply

karstenkoehler — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 06:12:44 GMT

Hi @anjeho,

Directly from the conversations inbox this is currently not possible. Other users have requested this here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Autoresponder-on-conversations-inbox/idi-p/303643

I'd recommend upvoting and commenting. The HubSpot product team reviews these requests based on their popularity.

As far as workarounds ago, if you're automatically creating tickets from conversations, HubSpot lets you send a 'We have received your ticket' email. Within a Service Hub Professional subscription, you could create two workflows to do this, instead of using the default one. These two ticket workflows would be limited to run either in working hours or outside of working hours. Effectively, they would be taking turns. Each one would send a different email. The one that runs outside of office hours would highlight that the response might take a bit longer. You would just have to make sure a ticket completing one of the workflows does not enroll in the other. Let me know if you want to pursue this and need more details, happy to elaborate.

Coming back to the request above: If you want to make it easier for others to find the existing request to the product team above, you can help them by accepting my reply as a solution. I'd appreciate it!

Have a great day!

Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply

anjeho — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 06:35:39 GMT

We do not use the default "We have received your ticket" email as our response time is usually within 10 minutes. (During business hours, of course.)

I think I may have figured it out! Though any feedback on something obvious I missed, before I turn it on, would be greatly appreciated. (Business hours are 9-5 everyday, and 8-5 Fri and Sat.)

A separate workflow for holidays. The previous workflow is set to pause on December 24 and 25.

Thank you!

Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply

karstenkoehler — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 06:47:57 GMT

Hi @anjeho,

The first workflow would still run within workflow hours, it would just not take any actions. You need to make sure that tickets that entered within working hours are removed by the time the workflow runs again. Have you defined unenrollment criteria for the workflow?

This could for example be the fact that the workflow unenrolls tickets once they change status. Otherwise a working hour ticket would sit there, wait to be outside of working hours and trigger the email.

Best regards!

Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply

anjeho — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 18:39:35 GMT

Oh! OK. I added a step to the workflow. After sending the email, the ticket status is changed to "Postponed", and under Settings I set Unenrollment and suppression to "Ticket status is any of Postponed (Support Pipeline)".

That should be it, I believe. Am I missing anything obvious?

Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply

karstenkoehler — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 06:50:07 GMT

Hi @anjeho,

The tickets that enroll outside of your team working hours aren't the issue I was referring to. The tickets inside of team working hours are. They would enroll, wait for the workflow working hours and then trigger the automated email.

Most of them will be excluded by your unenrollment and suppression setting, yes, correct. However, if there is ever a ticket that is forgotten and stays within the new ticket status, the contact might receive, after a few hours (once team working hours are over and workflow working hours begin) the email. If you say that this is unlikely and will never occurr, then yes, the above setup should work fine!

It sounds like you have a high ticket volume, I'd recommend testing this first before unleashing it to all new incoming tickets. You could do this by limiting workflow enrollment to tickets associated to a specific test email address. You can then switch the workflow on, log one ticket inside of team working hours, one outside of team working hours and check if everything works as expected. If it does, you can remove the additional contact email filter from the enrollment criteria.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

Re: Out of office / after hours auto reply

anjeho — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 17:25:25 GMT

Oh, I misunderstood. This is far more convoluted than I thought! 🙁

I created another workflow: "In Office". Same enrollment trigger. Next step set ticket status to "In Progress". Settings: specific times set to office hours. Unenrollment when ticket status is set to "In Progress".

Thank you for all your help with this. Greatly appreciated!