HubSpot Ideas

nina

Auto Rotate, ability to mark user as on vacation or sick to remove/skip them in workflow

We have a pretty big sales team and we require them to respond to leads quickly to them being received. If a lead sits without a response for more than 15 minutes we are not doing our work the way we would like. We use a handful of workflows to distribute leads evenly through an auto-rotation.

 

Right now if someone goes on vacation I have to edit each workflow to remove them that day and then put them back in when they return. 

 

The issue is that this then disrupts the workflow and it assigns back to back leads to the same person or generally doesn't work correctly. If I had some other way to mark a particular user someone as not taking leads that day so that it would skip them or mean I didn't have to edit each workflow automatically this would greatly help both my time spent and the issues my removing them and putting them back in creates. 

HubSpot Updates
Not Currently Planned
June 25, 2021 09:16 AM

Hey everyone,

 

Sorry for forgetting to update the status of this.

 

We currently don't have anything planned for this but will update this thread if that changes.

 

Best,

Jesse

Being Reviewed
April 20, 2020 12:21 PM

Hey Community!

 

Thanks for the replies and upvotes here. We are currently looking into this idea, and I will update the status with details when we have any new information.

 

One question I have for the group is: how do you all manage vacation now, and what would be the optimal way you would do this in HubSpot?

 

Thanks,

Jesse

94 Replies
Bryantworks
Key Advisor | Diamond Partner

Thanks @jtremblay for reviewing this!  

 

I work with a lot of different HubSpot accounts as a consultant on best practices, training, and implementations.  What I've had them do is remove that person from the rotation, then give themselves a task to add them back in based on when they'll return.  

From a product perspective, what I imagine a user could do is mark themselves as on vacation via the profile and preferences tab so that if they're a user in multiple accounts vacation would affect all portals they're associated with.  But that would be the spot I'd look to place it!

MGoves
Member

We are just getting to grips with hubspot and can confirm this would be really useful. I think not only for vacation but also - if someone is in a two hour meeting with a customer then I don't really want them being allocated new leads. I can therefore see two ways of this working 1) you already read availability from calendars for meetings function (which nicely reads the availability status from outlook so not all appointments have to count) respecting calendar availability would be the prefect solution to me as we will be putting "on holiday" or "catching up on admin" etc blockers into our calendars anyway for the meetings tool. 2) you could alternatively m put a toggle that the user can put on/off similar to what you have in the conversations inbox but you also the need a management view of that with a manager override and audit logs so that people ducking out can be spotted. The beauty of doing this via the calendar integration is that the manager can see / edit all of that through outlook already- less work for hubspot 

spogue
Top Contributor

@jtremblay To answer your question, I use Teams as the primary method of rotating leads so I need to remove the user from the team whenever they are out sick or on vacation. This method messes up reports where the Team is used and also creates manual work for managers. I can see how a big team can create a lot of work. My thought here echos others where the user can mark themselves away in their profile just like Conversations or just like an email away message. That way the rotation within a workflow knows to skip them. 

robbieskuse
Member

Hey Jesse, 

 

 

We would usually change our team at the end of every shift so that the current team members are active when leads come in. The manager is responsible for updating the teams, but often people can be missed, and deals get assigned to agents who have finished for the day or an agent who has just logged on its recieving any new leads. 

We try and reply with minutes to new leads, and the ability to  add a weekly schedule or easily change who's on the rotation would be fantastic. 

TheoB
Participant

Yes to this - it would be great to have better features to manage rotation. 

 

I) Make it easier to remove specific people from rotations

II) Make it easier to adjust rotations fractionally - so we can give our best agents more leads

 

How I am handling with a workaround right now:

- Set up two teams - e.g. "Sales USA" and "Sales USA - Off Rotation" (which is a child team of sales USA). 

- Workflows rotate leads to "Sales USA"

- All our reports, dashboards and other non-rotation workflows run for both Sales USA and the "Off Rotation" child team

- If an agent is off, we just move them to the "Off Rotation" team as their 'primary team'.  

 

 

I'd add - it would be great to have a central control for % distribution of leads within a team. So e.g. we can have a bunch of workflows rotating leads between "Sales UK" - but on the controls for sales UK, I can access "rotation settings" and say that Agent A gets 50%, agent B 30%, agent C 20%, and this is effective for every workflow rotating amongst "Sales UK". 

chrisbreikss
Contributor | Diamond Partner

I am trying to sync it with our BambooHR software via Zapier right now as a workaround.

orianef
Participant

@jtremblay Hi Jesse, thank you for your feedback on this idea. 

We are as well working with 15 different workflows for automatic assignment and it takes a long time to add and remove the sales, each workflow having four different branches. 

 

Ideally, we would like to have it synced with Google Calendar where the sales could block her/his time off. I totally agree with @TheoB regarding the %age in the workflows. It could allow us to assign more deals to someone coming back from holidays. 

 

Thank you!

benjaminguigui
Member

Same case! That would be very helpful to put a status "on vacation"

As it's been reviewed for 3 months, when could we expect this new feature?

Thx

mcraciun
HubSpot Employee

This would be a really helpful feature, especially for big teams that are using the lead rotation action in various workflows. 

erinhartje
Participant

I also have to manually take them out of the team and then put them back in when they are off. It would be great if I can enter when that person is on vacation so they do not get any new leads in the rotation. 

Iwan_was_here
Member

Hi, any updates from HubSpot re a solution to mark sales users as "away" when temporarily unavailable to accept leads? This looks like a big need for most sales teams. 

GregZ
Member

+1 on this.  Same problem.  Would also add:

  1. Need ability for sales reps to turn on/off their ability to accept new leads or link it to a calendar that can be managed.   And we should get all the reporting goodies from this such as when they are "on" or "off."
  2. Need ability to load balance leads.  Round-robin may not always be the right thing if we're looking to get to customers quickly.  
rodcunha
Participant

Any news on this? It has been requested in 2017? Seems like a pretty basic functionality when you're operating a lead rotation system. 

 

I'm requesting this to handle the chats on our website. We are rotating through a team, there should be a way for a user to mark himself as offline or away or something. Most other chat software provide this.

 

HarvestROI
Contributor | Platinum Partner

@jtremblay The way that we are managing vacations now is to create a Team literally called "On Vacation" and move the sales reps who are out onto that team so that they are not in rotation. The bigger problem lies here. One of our clients has 4 sales teams and an "open" territory that round robins to all of the reps. Since they already belong to a primary team and we can't add them to a second team that works with the rotation tool. Those reps are added into the workflow rotation as "Specific Users" and we have to go into the workflow and delete and add the reps when they come on and off vacation. A simple "Away" toggle that restricts the rep from receiving leads while on vacation is a much cleaner and much needed solution!

Drew_Cohen
Top Contributor

I also agree this would be a great feature, and one that is even more important given Hubspot's focus and push to dominate the CRM market. With more folks on the sales team spending their time inside of Hubspot, it's more important than ever to make sure that lead flow can be properly handled.

SiMellodew
Member | Diamond Partner

We have a real need for this.
It was a custom build in Salesforce and the client needs this in Hubspot. A user being able to remove themselves from the lead rotation workflow when they are unavailble, either by a check box/date range in their user profile page or via a connected calendar with an out of office which in turn removes and adds them back in to the rotation for the OoO period . Having to manually remove a person from a team or workflow rotation and then add them back is really inefficient for the CRM admin team for large sales teams in and out of the office as well as on leave.

We are also exploring how to trigger the action form a thirdparty App so they dont even have to log in to hubspot.

 

mollyc123
Member

Hi jtremblay - I would love to know if there is any update on this essential feature! 

 

To answer your question, the way we currently handle this when a sales rep goes on vacation (or is out sick) is by removing them from the team under the "Users & Teams" section in settings, and switching them to a different team that is not in our workflow which assigns and rotates leads.  For example, if 'Team A' has 20 sales reps and one goes on vacation, then we will take that one user out of 'Team A' and switch them to 'Team B' until they return. The workflow which assigns and rotates leads is only associated with 'Team A', so they are essentially taken out of the round-robin workflow and will not receive any leads at all. 

 

This is time-consuming and not ideal since it's a very manual process that has to be monitored and handles within a moments notice. Additionally, that rep will get far fewer leads than the rest of the team, which causes an unfair balance and a much larger workload for the rest of the team while that rep is away.

 

It would be ideal to be able to set distribution percentages per rep, so that if someone is on vacation or sick they can still come back to some leads who will still receive automated emails if they get assigned to that rep while they are away, rather than getting none at all and making the workload more difficult to manage for the rest of the reps. 

 

There are plenty of HubSpot users who are in need of the ability to rotate leads with fixed distribution percentages, as you can see in this other thread: 

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Rotating-leads-with-fixed-distribution-percentages/id...

PeterW121
Member

@jtremblay It is now over a year while this is being reviewed. 
As others mentioned a toggle switch to "On vacation" that removes the user from the rotations and lead assignment would be useful. 
When the user is "on vacation" the other primary and secondary members of the team would get assigned the: leads, tasks, support tickets etc.

Can you please update us in this thread what is the current status and if your dev team actually working on it? 

AHudson
Contributor

Updates on this idea?

jtremblay
HubSpot Product Team

Hey everyone,

 

Sorry for forgetting to update the status of this.

 

We currently don't have anything planned for this but will update this thread if that changes.

 

Best,

Jesse