I’d love to request improved support for recurring Out of Office (OOO) events in Help Desk’s calendar-based availability.
Current behavior
- I have my Google/Outlook calendar connected and “Sync out of office with your calendar” enabled under Users & Teams > Preferences > Working hours.
- Single, non-recurring OOO events created after enabling this setting are respected by Help Desk for agent availability and automatic assignment.
- However, recurring OOO events on my external calendar (for example, a bi-weekly “OOO – school pickup” block, or a recurring vacation series) are not consistently reflected in Help Desk:
- Often only the first occurrence of the recurring series is recognized.
- Future instances of the same recurring OOO do not reliably block availability for assignment unless I manually edit individual occurrences or recreate them as separate events.
Impact
- We use Help Desk for automatic assignment and rely heavily on accurate agent availability.
- Agents appear available during times when they are actually OOO on their connected calendar, which leads to:
- Tickets being routed to unavailable reps.
- Manual reassignment work for our team.
- Manual workarounds to the system, causes reporting issues and possible misses.
- Slower response times and potential impact on customer experience.
Requested behavior
- Treat recurring OOO series the same way as single OOO events for Help Desk availability, so that:
- All future occurrences in a recurring OOO series are taken into account for agent availability, not just the first occurrence or edited ones.
- Agents are automatically marked unavailable in Help Desk for every occurrence of a recurring OOO that exists on their connected calendar.
- Ideally, this should work for:
- Recurring all‑day OOO events.
- Recurring partial‑day OOO blocks (e.g., every Friday 1–5pm).