I know HubSpot Inbox doesn’t support automatic out-of-office replies. Does the Help Desk tool support this functionality?
I’ve seen mixed answers online; someone on Reddit claimed it does, and ChatGPT gave conflicting answers.
If Help Desk does support out-of-office auto-replies, where can I find the setting to configure them?
If it doesn’t, is there a reason HubSpot hasn’t implemented this yet? This feels like a fundamental feature for any team that doesn’t operate 24/7. Standard email systems have supported out-of-office replies for decades.
It doesn’t technically have an out-of-office auto-reply, as far as I’m aware. The reason you’re seeing mixed answers is that you can handle most of this with routing, but it’s not a true OOO like you’d experience with a Gmail or 365 setup.
If someone is out of office because they’re not marked available (either manually or because they set working hours), new conversations/tickets won’t be routed to them. If everyone is unavailable, it won’t be routed to anyone.
If you want an auto-response with Help Desk, the closest option is a ticket-based workflow that sends an acknowledgement email like: “We got your message, we’ll reply during business hours.”
I can’t answer why the functionality isn’t available, but it would be worth adding to the Ideas forum!
If you want an auto-response with Help Desk, the closest option is a ticket-based workflow that sends an acknowledgement email like: “We got your message, we’ll reply during business hours.”
I’m aware. You can do the same with Inbox. It’s a hack that requires Marketing Hub, and the emails it sends are marketing emails. True out-of-office replies are transactional, operational, are service/support events, and are expected to be a threaded conversational responses. Not a brand new email that ends up in the recipient’s spam folder. Additionally, marketing emails are subject to subscription types, opt-in/out logic, and suppression lists. An out-of-office response should be sent regardless of marketing subscription status.
I’m definitely not disagreeing with your point on having more comprehensive functionality here, that would be ideal.
You can send an email to a contact associated with a ticket when it’s created without Marketing Pro/Ent.
The above is a portal that uses Service/Sales Pro. It’s for a closed ticket, but you can do the same for an open ticket. If I’m not mistaken, this is technically considered a transactional email, but not tied to the add-on.
You could in theory, have a separate ticket pipeline for after-hours tickets because that email you see in the screenshot can be customized.
