Yeah, its a major oversight…
Very basic, core functionality for any modern customer-service CRM. Any service team consisting of more than one person working at the same time is bound to run into collisions otherwise.
When we switched over to Hubspot Service a couple of years ago it was implied it was in the works and coming soon; and eventually a light version of it was rolled out to the Conversations view (which our team doesn’t use), and it was implied it’d come to Tickets next… But so far, crickets!
Hubspot suggests using their round-robin auto-assignment tool instead -- if everything is auto-assigned, then everyone is assured to be working on different tickets.
That’s great for certain scenarios, but Hubspot’s options for this are also too basic to be very useful for teams of even moderate size or complexity. e.g., The auto-assignments are defined by pre-selecting specific people or teams to assign to -- with no smart-exclusions based around whether a rep is even currently logged into the site for work, out sick, on vacation, off-shift, etc… So you end up having to create and constantly maintain a complex set of interlocking workflows, with each workflow set to auto-assign specific reps based on the specific days/times those reps usually work, along with auto-unassignment workflows that re-assign unworked tickets (as a fallback for if you aren’t going in to add/remove reps from the workflows when not available to work during their regular shift), etc.
On the upside, auto-assignment does help lend itself to equal distribution of work, and can increase efficiency, compared to waiting for reps to choose their own tickets.
Another option is to come up with other assignment logic -- e.g., assign tickets of type/category/priority to Agent X, and all other tickets to Agent Y… The logic around that becoming more complex depending on how many reps you have, and whether or not that’s a fair way to distribute the work.
But even with these various workarounds, being able to open a ticket and see that another rep is also already looking at the same ticket would be super-helpful.