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.
HubSpot Updates
July 19, 2024 06:03 AM

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).

April 09, 2024 05:53 AM

You make a good point, @Arne. Let me chat with the Automations team and see where we want to go from here 🙂 

April 09, 2024 05:24 AM

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.

February 22, 2024 04:19 AM

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.

February 21, 2024 05:28 AM

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.

In Planning
November 13, 2023 06:14 AM

114 Replies
KSpreckley
Member

This would be functionality that we would greatly benefit from also.

AOgilvy
Member

It would be great to have this in action. We currently have a 'rotate contact' in action within a workflow to allocate our leads. Currently when a team member is on annual leave I have to remove them from the 'rotate record' to ensure that they do not get allocated any while they are away. However, when adding them back in it resets the flow and jumps back to the top of the que meaning the next person that was due to get a lead is missed and has to wait. If Hubspot could recagnise when people are on annual leave from calendars or working hours it would 1. take the labourious task away from me and 2. ensure that the person is just skipped for that time and the next person is still allocate dthe next lead. 

 

If anyone else has had this issue and has a work around in the meantime it would be great if you could share. 

 

 

KTangen
Member

Currently, admins must manually add or remove users from teams to reflect their OOO status, which is a significant overhead. I propose adding a feature where users can set their OOO status in their own profile. When users are marked as OOO, the system should automatically exclude them from round-robin contact assignments. This would streamline the process and ensure smooth operations without requiring constant administrative intervention.

Jnix284
Hall of Famer

There is currently an OOO beta for Inbox and Help Desk that should start to address some of the ideas here, it says June 18, but it's only been available to join the beta for a few days.

Jnix284_0-1720619867906.png

 

KTangen
Member

Does this also works for Round Robin contact assignments for spreading leads to team membersfrom in workflows?

 

Arne
Top Contributor
Why not use the calendar integration. With a bit of intelligence it can identify full daily leaves or longer absence (vacation)?
KChristophe
Member

@jdemello thanks for your latest update! We've registered for the beta, but after testing we realise the use case is a bit different to our expectations, so I wanted to confirm whether the use case of displaying if a User is Out of Office when attempting to @mention a user in a ticket note or comment i.e. hey @johndoe (out of office) should be another product idea submission or if this might be considered in the current one as it's not workflow related. 

FPalmisano
Contributor

Hi @Jnix284 @jdemello , thanks for your work on this!
We just joined the BETA. We currently have Tickets assigned among teams, is the OOO user excluded from that one too? Does it apply only to conversations?

jdemello
HubSpot Product Team

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).

FVilas
Member

Hi @jdemello, what about the "Out of Office" feature in Workflows? I saw that you implemented it in some tools, and in a post, you mentioned that we should create a new topic for this feature in specific tools like Workflows. I found one, but it only has 3 votes and is still in "Idea Submitted" status.

 

Do you have any updates on this feature in Workflows?

 

Thank you!

JRosenthal6
Member

I'm seconding the comment from @FVilas, the out of office feature for worklows is pretty essential to us. Is there a new topic for this now or is it being worked on in the context of this post? Would love to hear also if you have any (even very rough) updates as to timelines.

 

I see on the community forums in general some of these requests can take years to implement so we're a little anxious about this. I understand the need to prioritize but this feels like a pretty logical request to push forward from my perspective. 

KChristophe
Member

@jdemello I saw your reply about the addition of OOO to at mentions in this message  but I've tried finding a way to activate it with working hours and preferences and wasn't able to make it work... Is the feature active and released?

PMignon
Member

Agree with the add-on! Would make super sense to have it!

OAguilarVarga
Participant

Hi,  @jdemello do you have news? we need OoO inbox notifications