Set chat availability based on user's calendar

[ernopyykko]

Would it be possible to get the Messages availability to work in the same fashion as the Meetings integration?

A person online/offline status would be toggled on and off based on their calendar. 

I would even suggest giving an option, to turn off the Messages from the website when all users are either blocked based on their calendar or offline based on their schedule.

[hroberts]

Hi @ernopyykko! We do currently offer the ability to set a schedule in Messages for online/offline time (see https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/messages/how-can-i-set-up-my-availability-for-sal...), so we can use this post to gauge interest in incorporating an actual calendar integration that will do that automatically and flexibly for users.

[ernopyykko]

Hi @HR, 

Thanks for the prompt reply. 🙂

Yep, we have that schedule set for our business development team. But would like to expand the messages use for sales and potentially customer success as well. 

Sales and customer success have several meetings throughout the day, so it would be good to have an integration for them to get most out of this function as well. Otherwise, they'll keep missing messages. 

We also have a few hour gap because of the timezones we work in, so it would be really useful to have all the messages being turned off based on a schedule and or calendar integration. 

[RyanMurphy123]

This would be a great feature to have for my team as well.  Messages linked to calendar just like Meetings is currently.  Online and Offline status or at least outward message availability would be automatically determined based upon meetings scheduled in outlook calendar.

[Nwclark85]

Hi

We have just started to use messages and have our office 365 calendars linked to our hubspot accounts. I think it would be great if you could set yourself as 'offline' in messages, if you were 'busy' in your office calendar, in the same way that you can with meetings.

This would allow you to have the settings as 'turn messages online/offline based on your schedule' but have that overidden if something in your diary sets you as busy.

Thanks Nick

[meclark]

I think this would be a great thing to explore with our existing calendar integrations. This could hold a lot of water when it comes to last-minute meetings or other circumstances that may cause a discrepancy between the two calendars.

[mpike]

 Yes! We haven't started using this function yet - partly because I'm concerned that it will take us too long to respond to messages if our reps are in the middle of something and have forgotten to go "offline" (we have a fairly small team).

[ernopyykko]

@hroberts, how many more votes should we get on this to make it move forward? 😛

[brittanyCP1]

Hello,

It would be awesome if the Messages feature worked similar to the Meetings tool. For example, I would like the Messages tool to automatically make my message bobble pop up depending on what's on my schedule. If I'm [BUSY], it should automatically remove my bubble. If I'm available, it should automatically display me as [AVAILABLE]. I don't want to have to remember to select a switch to make sure it works properly.. It's too much manual work.

Please let me know if you have any questions for me.

Thanks
Brittany

[amberfernald]

This would be incredibly useful!  If the messages tool were to directly reference calendar availability, it would create a better experience for the user and the chatting customer! 

[DFerguson]

There should be a way to integrate your Office 365 calendar into Messages, similar to how Meetings does. 

It would not be ideal to make a calendar in the Availability tab, only to end up in a meeting and miss someone messaging you because you don't have a synced calendar.

A calendar integration feature could make appearing Online/Offline easier, too.

Right now, the only other option to change your status from Online to Offline is to have the Chat tab open in your browser. It is a tedious process to have to make sure that tab is open every time you go back to your computer.

[timscales]

+1 on this idea!

[Carv]

We'd like this feature too. 

[Anonymous]

I think this would be a great feature, especially for international companies working in different time zones.

[setheryb]

@hroberts Has there been any progress on this since the idea was submitted in 2017? If it's a beta feature, we would sign up for that immediately.

[YosukeDS]

@hroberts I'm currently working with an international sales team to launch live chat and there's a lot of friction having to manually set availability in between meetings. Since we work across various time zones, I have our group setting based on availability (vs. operating hours). If we get the ability sync availability with the calendar, it'll address both the time zone issue as well as having to set it manually.

Please see what you can do to prioritize this request. Although it has lower upvotes, this feature can have a big impact in our sales enablement efforts. In the meantime, can you propose a work-around?

[Anonymous]

We are also having challenges in utilizing HubSpot's live chat efficiently because of the same problems people describe above. It's a pity that we might need to look for another live chat solution.

[DougWillems]

hi, yes please, this world be great timing for our company (so to speak!)

we'd also be interested in testing out a beta version

thanks,

Doug

[Herschel]

We would very much like to see this rolled out. Our team members often have a lot of meetings with prospects, clients and internal stake holders throughout the day and requiring everyone to manually adjust their inbox availability when they already have their calendars synced to Hubspot is annoying and burdensome. This is particularly an issue as different users not only have dynamic schedules day to day but also different from those of the whole team, so solving this issue using only the existing office hours availability scheduling is not possible.

@cdewey22 the new changes to allow admin level user availability control are great, but it would be awesome if individual user's calendars synced to their Inbox availability as well. Any chance this feature can get some love soon?

[cdewey22]

Thanks so much @Herschel for the feedback! This was some of the main feedback from the beta rollout. We are digging into this problem now to understand a couple of different options for more granular controls at the agent level. I would love to reach out over email to chat through some solutions. If you are interested feel free to email me at cdewey@hubspot.com so I can understand a bit more about your usecase and would love to chat through some of the ideas we have around this. Thank you!