Hi there, it would be great to have better controls for user availability for chat.
1 - let us set different office hours for different chat flows
We have offices in multiple time zones - California and London - these use different chat flows routed to different teams. We cannot set office hours right now because we have to set it universally for all the chat flows.
2 - let sales users schedule their chat availability
The above wouldn't be a problem if we could automatically schedule chat availability - just like the meetings links - as well as manually toggling it on and off.
Right now, our sales reps have to manually toggle their availability. If they forget, we end up with angry messages from disappointed visitors who expected to talk to a human and got a bot and then an away message.
Given we're forced not to use 'business hours', giving individual sales reps this tool would avoid mistakes.
I think this feature really matters if you have a small team multi-tasking on chat - if you have lots of dedicated people there will always be someone availabile, but thats not the case for smaller companies that use hubspot.
This should allow us to assign to specific work hours per team member, not randomly. There's no structure to this...honestly, it's weak. Please consider changing/updating for a better user experience.
This feels like a pretty standard tool for managing chat availability that isn't in place yet. Not having it makes it difficult for global teams to ensure that their working hours are accounted for in their availability. It also makes it too easy for someone to forget to toggle themselves away when they sign off, leaving the chat open and no one attending.
As already mentioned by other users, it is very error-prone if the availability can only be set manually. To avoid frustration/annoyance with customers, an option to schedule users' availability (in our case to manage the assigning of new conversations/tickets only to available users) is an essential feature. We look forward to an update on this! 🙂
Bumping this one up - we have chat availability based on business hours right now but could really use the following options, for each specific chatflow, to give the best user experience:
Availability based on Outlook Calander
Availability based on Microsoft Teams avaiability
For more context, right now I have a small team monitoring/replying to a chat inbox via Microsoft Teams. They're not daily HubSpot users so rarely go into the platform. Their Teams availability is the best way to determine if they're available to take chats. Right now we have many chats that go unanswered, and I don't see a way to have a bot respond after X time period that no one is available to answer their unassisgned chat. If I could hide the chat based on their Teams availability that would be ideal. I would settle for Outlook availability to at least hide it when they're blocked off or marked OOO.
This is desperately needed!! We have chats that come through and because it is only manual we have a high likelihood of missing live chats due to the time sensitivity, especially in non-business hours. We always have people on call but it takes a while for the notifications to get around to understand it has been assigned to another team member. Having the ability to schedule working hours would be a major upgrade! I am surprised this has not been resolved by now.
This would be really helpful for web chats but also facebook chats! We are B2C and have customers chatting at all times. During business hours, I want a chat that will automatically assign to my sales associates, but when we are not in business hours, I would love to have a bot that can try to help or collect more information
