HubSpot Ideas

Arne

HubSpot User is Out of Office

We have quite a number of workflows in HubSpot that classify, notify, assign tasks and owners.

If such users are out of office, processes get stuck in the dead end waiting for the users to eg come back from vacation.

We are using rotation in some cases to make sure that eg an initial follow up still takes place by a team member even if the initial user didn’t react in time.

We also added delays of 1 day to make sure the initially selected users had the opportunity to work on a task.

After that delay a rotation takes place.

Bad enough that the first user was out of office, the next that received the task via rotation was OoO as well.

We cannot delay and rotate again and again until we finally find one that actually works on the follow up action.

Please add an option where users (and as a fallback the team lead/delegate) can set themselves Out of Office and define their delegate to make sure that important workflows don‘t get stuck due to absence or at least get delayed by several days until rotation finally found a user.

It’s needed fast, ie before summer vacations start everywhere.
93 Replies
NHutchinson
Participant

This feature would save sooo much manual work! With a team of 40+ salespeople being used in workflows to direct time-sensitive customer behaviours, we need an easier way to deal with OoO. 

cwastney
Member

Ditto. Very keen on this idea. 

RSleiman
Member

Commenting to create urgency on this again!  This would be incredibly helpful in so many automations rather than doing everything manually.

JU
Member

Hi HubSpot Dev Team. Please conside this idea among the next product updates. This is a highly requested feature in HubSpot.

peter_mxtoolbox
Member

Do these topics actually make an impact on what is worked on for future features? This HAS to be something every organization deals with right?

JFountain
Member

I feel like they are completely ignoring this easy win. You can already have Outlook integrated and setup scheduled calls with people based on their availability. With the existing integration, workflows should be easy to set those same rules to. Clearly they never really look at these or take into account what partners need. We had a meeting with the product managers and really thought this would be prioritized. We never heard back from them after that initial meeting and they have yet to reply to one email.

fiachra_duffy
HubSpot Employee

Repost of my earlier answer as it's currently the best way around this:

 

Two potential workarounds on this: 

 

Option 1 (if you're assigning round-robin to a team)

If you're assigning to a team then should be easy, just move the user out of the team when they’re out of office and they wont be assigned anything. Perhaps create an OOO Team for this

 

Option 2 (if you're assigning to an individual)
If you're assigning to an individual, you could set up a second workflow

Enrolment criteria would be contacts whose owner = person X (the person who is OOO)

  • Step 1: re-assign owner to whomever is covering for person X
  • Step 2: alert the new owner

You can create a list of contacts that have completed the workflow if you need to see all those leads

 

Turn this workflow off when the person comes back to work 🙂 

 

Accept Solution.gif

JFountain
Member

This is not a solution. This is a manual process that everyone upvoting this idea is already doing currently. 

RSleiman
Member

I agree.  That is a "workaround".  Under the Users tab, there's no reason there can't be just a checkmark box that we can click when a rep is sick or OOO.  If that checkmark is selected, they would be removed from any rotations in play.

ahenryezclaim
Member

I couldn't agree more.  We're making it work with manual workarounds, but it's very cumbersome.  I find it extremely disappointing that Hubspot has yet to implement this critical feature.

JFountain
Member

Honestly there is no reason this can't be all automated. Our reps already have their outlook accounts integrated with Hubspot so that people can schedule calls with them. If Hubspot already has full access to Outlook, a rep with an OOO setup should easily be translated over to Hubspot Workflows so that there is no need to manually pull everyone on and put back in when they are back. We currently have to setup email reminders for management to take people out/add to workflows. People miss emails/reminders so it results in our team unknowingly taking on more work than they should.

ksalazar
Member

@JFountain agree - this should be way simpler than creating more workflows that would need to contantly be managed. 

rachcharboneau
Contributor

Hubspot dev, PLEASE PLEASE add an OOO feature for reps!!! 

JEvans91
Member

+1 - Trying to wrap my head around how to ensure conversations and tasks aren't missed when an agent is on vacation. 

laurabren
Contributor

HubSpot team -- this is a two-pronged issue for us:

 

1) Manually removing reps from teams/lead rotation workflows creates a LOT of room for error:

 

  • Someone might forget to add them back in
  • Schedules can change week to week
  • They might want to check in on a lead or report while they're out, and would lose access if the views are restricted by team
  • We wouldn't be able to add them back in until business hours begin on their day back, and so they'd miss the "overnight" leads that start at midnight on those days

2) Without this, we're left having to manually reassign leads that go to OOO/off-schedule reps, which comes with another set of problems:

 

  • Related tasks can't be bulk reassigned or auto-closed
  • Meetings can't be changed to different owners (we allow leads to book their own tours via meetings tool -- in this scenario, meetings preface deals/lead assignment, and not the other way around, so reassigning a meeting has a huge downsteam impact)
  • Meetings also trigger personalized texts to leads, so when we reassign, the lead gets a slew of new but duplicate texts from the new owner

 

Allowing us to control lead rotation by marking reps as out of the office (either ad hoc, or via a schedule we can program) would make a HUGE impact for everyone from our HubSpot admins, to our reps, to our leads and the customer experience. HubSpot knows better than anyone that response time for leads is crticial to close probability -- please help us clear some of these hurdles and implement a solution to this!

Arne
Top Contributor

Well, all HubSpot enthusiasts .... I have asked for that mission critical functionality on Apr 27, 2019 2:43 AM.

Someone does not seem to understand that we are all suffering from this big time.

Tasks in Nirvana. E.g. you have a webinar and the follow up shall take place a day or two later with extra info and client rep introduction ...

.....silence ... silence ... like Pink Floyd would sing "Is there anybody out there"

Honestly, I am tired of submitting features as "IDEAS" that should be standard out-of-the-box functionalities!!!

JPak
Member

+1

 

HubSpot team - please make this a priority! It's crucial to be able to identify specific people as "Away" or "Out of Office" so that they can be excluded from workflows and deal/ticket/etc ownership. There is a lot of room for error (and it's quite tedious) in manually reassigning items away from individuals who are not available to answer customer questions.

 

Please make a "status" reportable as a property to easily add to workflows.

pleach
Member

Adding our vote too. An out of office designation or away, or something to keep tickets flowing to available staff.  We want to turn on the automated ticket assignment, but this will impact our ability to resolve tickets in a timely manner.  The work arounds are not user friendly and do not allow for staff members to just updated their status to OOO.  

sethnenstiel
Contributor

When is this going into production?

springboardjade
Member

Yes would love an OOO feature. And the ability to set an auto-response if an email is assigned to someone who is OOO