The Out of Office app

Plan requirement

Subscription Any plan
Access Agent

Marking an agent away so work stops reaching them. One of the most useful free apps there is.

Use it

  1. Install the app.
  2. Mark yourself or a colleague as out of office, with dates.
  3. Choose what happens to tickets assigned to them.
  4. Set it back on return.

The problem it solves

Tickets assigned to somebody on holiday look assigned. Nothing flags them, no view shows them as unattended, and the customer waits two weeks.

It is the quietest way for support to fail, and it happens in every team that does not handle this.

Decide what happens to their queue

Reassigning open tickets, or returning them to the group, is as important as stopping new ones. Somebody going away with fifteen open tickets leaves fifteen customers waiting.

Make it part of leaving

Alongside the calendar entry and the email auto-reply. It takes ten seconds and it is the one people forget because it lives in a different system.

Set the return date

Then it clears itself. An agent who forgets to switch it off receives nothing for a week after coming back, which is a different version of the same problem.

Use it for more than holidays

Training, a project, a day of meetings. Anything where somebody should not receive new work is worth marking, and it also makes the schedule honest.

Where you use agent statuses

Unified statuses cover part of this for live channels. This app covers assignment, which statuses do not, so the two complement each other rather than overlapping.

See also

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