HubSpot Ideas

Calebb

Auto-set chat agents to Away at the end of business hours

A nice to have chatflow is the ability to auto-set all users/teams to "Away" when the business hours end of day parameter has been met so that our agents do not forget to do this themselves. 

 

Is it possible to set a global or individual daily reminder for agents in HubSpot?

 

16 Replies
cdewey22
HubSpot Product Team

thanks so much for the feedback @Calebb,  It looks like you are leveraging the team availablity of office hours for live chat. This should turn the chat widget to the outside of office hours mode and not display as if there are agents online without any action from the agents themselves, similar to how you are describing this above. Are you noticing this functionality work this way or would expect this to work differently?

 

Also, feel free to email me directly @ cdewey@hubspot.com to chat in more detail about this request! thank you so much for your feedback and time. 

kbarnett
Member

This would be a great feature.

 

Right now, we're getting after-hour chats from our website, and no one is there to reply. It doesn't give the most profession feel for the person looking for fast answers. 

MGottero
Member

That would be a great addition.

 

Similarly, I think it would be a great help if team member's availability was linked to their calendar. So that if a team member is on a call for a window of 30 minutes, their availability is automatically switched to "Away" for that time. 

BZiegler
Participant

It would be super helpful. Having If/then branches linked in your chatbots look terrible when a chat is pushed to an agent who forgot to turn off their availability. There isn't even a way to cover this by moving to a creating a ticket and closing a conversation if the agent doesn't engage within say 2 or 3 minutes. Even that would be a huge help and not leave people stranded.

 

rsail
HubSpot Product Team
Thanks for all of the upvotes on this idea! Our team is aware of the need for more advanced availability settings, and we're continuing to prioritize improvements for this. I will continue to post relevant updates in this thread.
 
One note on this request in particular: If chat availability is set to "Based on business hours" chats will not be routed to agents outside of those business hours, regardless of whether or not the agent is set to available. We've recently shipped some lightweight changes to make this clearer in the UI, but I continue to welcome any feedback! Please feel free to reach out to rpetrozzino@hubspot.com
SamuelBanks
Participant | Elite Partner

+1 - This is super needed from a base customer-service perspective as with other systems it's implied when the tab is closed, the system will mark them as 'away'. However at the moment, it still leaves them as active and can skew any chatbots using the function

EDAmbrosio
Member

+1. I manage the LiveChat team. We utilize the after hours function but it'd be super helpful to set up a time frame for their lunches (or allow a workflow to).  I find myself constantly switching their availability to away because they keep forgetting to do so on their own. They are human, I get it, but i'd like to rid myself of this monitoring each afternoon.

ivanarefin
Member

I completely agree. Our company have been using a different tool for years, did not have any issue. After switching to HS this has been our concern, many times we have to remainder people to set them away when they are leaving. But all of us are not set on the same office premise, so sometime we face this now. 

 

Agent-based auto online-offline (scheduling) settings needs to be updated, thanks

rtejpar
Member

Completely agree with this.
We just upgraded to Service Premium because of the LiveChat Bot/Knowledge Base integration, but the way that the LifeChat interplays with the chatbot is reliant on agent availability, which if there is no way to regulate this from the top down, then the only option is to turn the chat off outside of business hours, which would remove the chatbot/knowledge base lookup...
overall, it just feels very poorly designed for what i would imagine is a large number of use cases.

shammond-hammfg
Member

I also agree with the above. We utilize the business hours schedule, but we need an auto-away feature for agents that don't have mouse movement for a period of time. Our old chat program Comm100 did this perfectly.

DerekVest
Member

The lack of ability to have a chatbot stay up after business hours in any automated fashion is a big miss. A customer should have the ability to leverage the chatbot during off hours even when an agent is unavailable.

 

This could be solved in a few different ways:

  • Allow different chatflows to be active at different hours of the day, set in the chatflows themselves
  • Have more sophisticated handling of the overall chat availability - select a different chatflow for "Outside working hours" Inbox-Channels-Chat-Availability behavior
  • Have a setting that allows for agent availability to be set by a schedule and adjustable on an individual basis or a team basis

Right now I can set a chatflow to be up 24/7 and handle chatflow options based on availability, but I'm reliant on team members manually setting their availability which is a point of failure.

HampusIsaksson
Member

Would love to be able to auto-set a customer service agent as available or away. It affects our reporting to see how good we're doing in responding to that first message. Our customer service is open between 8am and 5pm, Mon-Fri. It's an easy thing to forget to switch off overnight or over weeekend, and then the numbers for that CS shoot up. Our CS is very diligent in switching it off an on, but will forget every once in a while. 

BRemeur
Member

We are considering moving from another chat tool to Hubspot, but not being able to setup individual auto available/away, nor the possibility to set "away" while the user closes his Hubspot window, is a major pain for the reliability of our Customer service. Any update on this @rsail ? 🙂

jdemello
HubSpot Product Team
 
QGUILLOT
Participant

Bonjour, 

 

En effet, dans des solutions concurrentes, on voit qu'on peut même définir des plannings par agent dans le cas où ces derniers ont des horaires différentes. Je trouves ça très utiles.

 

Quand pensez vous que la fonctionnalité pourra voir le jour ? 

jdemello
HubSpot Product Team

Good morning, everyone! We are working on building out user working hours, and you can learn more about the upcoming feature here. We anticipate this feature being available for beta in March. At this time, the main focus is conversation or ticket routing and scheduled meetings. Our next priority is to add out of office as well, and that will come later in 2024.