Flagging if HubSpot Users are Out of Office

[JKohlmeier]

We moved our main service email inbox over to HubSpot last week. Our service team will regularly assign conversations to members of other teams best suited to answer the email.

Is there a way for a HubSpot user to easily set themselves as out of office that would flag our service team that they're gone and be able to set expectations with the customer of when they would get a reply?

Any other creative ideas for how to solve this instead of letting a conversation sit open the whole time?

[Jnix284]

Hi @JKohlmeier , and thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer, this is a really interesting topic and one I also hope to have a solution for, but unfortunately there is no elegant way to do this that I know of.

There's really two questions here - the first is how to identify someone on the team as Out of Office, and the second how to handle the conversation while waiting for an answer.

1 -

Outside of an external shared calendar or centralized resource that everyone can access, there isn't a mechanism in HubSpot directly that's going to notify you that someone is out of office / unavailable.

The conversation is going to sit open until the issue is resolved, whether that is because someone is out of office or it takes longer to find the resolution - if there is no one else on the team that can help, the only thing you can do is to let the customer know and then leave the conversation open until they return.

There would be a lot to gain from an OoO capability for HubSpot users, even if it were as simple as having a color/dot/symbole indicator next to their name when you mention them or see their name in a dropdown.

I recommend upvoting and sharing your feedback on this idea and this one so it reaches the product team.

There is a similar issue on the partner side, when there is a shared deal with HubSpot team members associated, there is no way of knowing whether that person is OoO and who to contact if they are. 

2-
We use the comments to flag conversations - the comments are highlighted yellow, so it's a great way to see the status without opening the full thread. Even if it is something simple like, "pending response from John Smith, OoO until 1/15" then at least everyone in the inbox knows the status.

I would also look at whether your service team should be assigning to other team members for direct response or if they should be seeking the information from those experts and communicating it back to the customer. 

Unless you anticipate back-and-forth or the need to connect two people on a zoom, etc., it would be a better customer experience if the service rep handles the customer communication directly and said something like, "Hi customer, I'm happy to help with (your issue) and have reached out to one of the experts on our (product) team for more information. They're currently out of the office and I won't have an update back until January 15th, but I'll send an update as soon as I have an answer back." Depending on the issue, your typical response time, etc. you can include an apology, but I think the most important aspect is to clearly communicate the expectations to the customer.

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @JKohlmeier,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! 

I would like to invite our subject matter experts to this conversation to see if they have advice.

Hi @Jnix284, @franksteiner79, @Olivia_Bagnall - Do you have any tips for @JKohlmeier?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen