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.
Lots of awesome activity on this post this week. Hope you all are enjoying the new capabilities!
@KChristophe Thanks for your question! We are going to add OOO to at mentions in another week or two 😄 So be on the lookout for that update.
@FPalmisano If you have a team in your routing rule, the users on that team that are OOO or away will not be considered eligible for assignment and will not be assigned. Right now, this only applies to channel-based routing (routing from inbox- or Help desk-connected channels and skill-based ticket routing). We are working with automation to bring this same functionality to the 'rotate owner' action so all tickets route consistently but don't have a timeline for that effort right now.
@Arne We plan to expand the current offering to utilize calendar connections and automatically sync OOO blocks if the user has a gcal or outlook connected (the same connection used for meetings). I know you're also concerned about the non-ticket use case for this feature and we are also working with automation to make that a reality, but I don't have any timelines right now. Per your original ask, I won't close this post until we've delivered on the ability for contact and task assignment to ignore users who are away (out of office or outside working hours or manually set to away).
Hey, folx! User Working Hours are rolling out across portals and should be fully live for you by 04/11. If you would like to get the feature early, reach out to your CSM and we can get you unlocked.
We are also working on User Out of Office, and look to deliver that in Summer 2024 for Help desk and Inboxes. If you have need for workflows' 'rotate owner' action to understand and route based on user availability or out of office, then please talk with your CSM or spin up an additional idea forum post just for workflows. Given the many use cases in this post that span multiple products, we won't hold the request open until every last one is served. We will consider this request delivered once we have out of office for help desk and inbox. If you have additional needs outside of help desk and inbox, please open a request on a specific product (workflows) or specific product area (Sales Hub) so that product group can prioritize accordingly.
Do you know if this feature will be available to use in "rotate record" steps in workflows? Our specific use case is contact owner and/or deal assignment. We route them based on who is available and working that day so the leads can be followed up with promptly.
@laurabren Not at this time. We're discussing with the workflows team, but I don't have a timeline.
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.
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.
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.
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🙂
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
