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One of my agents will go on holiday for 2 weeks, how do you handle cases assigned to him?

Related products:Freshdesk
  • November 29, 2012
  • 30 replies
  • 117 views
W
Contributor
One of my agent is going on Holiday for 2 weeks.

How would you handle the cases assigned against this agent.
I would like to give other agents a subscription to his cases so they get notified by clients asking questions.

does anyone have a suitable solution?

30 replies

V
Contributor
  • vijay.shankar
  • Contributor
  • November 30, 2012
Hi Erik

As a workaround, maybe you can use the ASSUME IDENTITY function from the Profile Setting and assume the ROLE for this Agent and reply to tickets.

We're also planning to address this in our system, so we will come up with some other option soon

regards
Vijay
W
Contributor
  • withoude
  • Author
  • Contributor
  • December 10, 2012
That's not a workable solution.

What I did in this case was assign the email address to a group email address within the company, that way whoever was available would take the case and solve it under his/her name. The only problem is that when two people go on holiday and I want to use the same group email address it says that an agent already exists with this email address.
L
Community Debut
  • lin.cass
  • Community Debut
  • April 8, 2013

Could we have a facility in the system where agents can put in a holiday date so that new tickets cannot be assigned to them when away?


Additionally you already mention your looking into addressing open tickets when an Agent is away, possibility of moving tickets to another agent via a script ?


Thanks,


Lin

A
Contributor

The way is to sign this agents in holiday until a date and all reply to theri ticket re-open the tickets and notify the group!

W
Contributor
  • withoude
  • Author
  • Contributor
  • December 12, 2014

any solutions to this yet?


fairly common issue I would assume?

annapoorna.venketaraman
Skilled Expert
Forum|alt.badge.img+8

Erik, 


The solution that can be suggested right now is of setting up an Observer rule. 


Whenever an agent is going on a vacation, you can setup an Observer rule that would check for replies coming to tickets assigned to this particular agent and then notifying a group or another agent about it. 

You can also go ahead and move the ticket to another agent, if required. 


The rule would roughly look like below.


When any of the events occur:


Reply Is Sent 

Note Is Added


And the events are performed by:


Requestor


On tickets with these properties:


Agent Is <agent 1>


Perform these actions:


Send email to Group <group 1>

Assign to Agent <agent 2>


Here, I have assumed that agent 1 is on leave and whenever a customer responds to his ticket, an email gets sent to Group1 and the ticket is re-assigned to agent 2. 


Let me know if you think this would help.


Anna

Head of Community
A
Contributor

I adopt this solution yet, but it's not convenient. I have to mind to enable/disable manually the rule when agent leaves the office or come back.

I need to set a date on and a date off :-)

thanks

C
Community Debut
  • charles_10540
  • Community Debut
  • August 28, 2015

As Alessio says, this works, but it's hardly convenient (except when I forget to turn the rule off for me - then it's quite handy).


A fully integrated solution would obviously be best, but a 'quick fix' might be to add a 'last updated date' to the ticket properties, then you could compare this against the return date of the agent and the rule would only apply up until their return.


Charles

I
Contributor
  • ivan_13609
  • Contributor
  • September 9, 2016

I agree have a possibility to set and agent as AWAY for a certain period of time would be great. 

In case the AWAY is set, all the assigned tickets and all new replies to the currently not open tickets should to the Group the ticket belongs to so the round robin could reassign them to the available agents. 


We have a big team and sometimes people forget that some one is on holiday and assign tickets to them. 

And you constantly need to check this agent's tickets as the customer might respond any minute. 


Have a rule is might help, but we are getting a tons of emails already (SLA violations, etc) and this would just "spam" the mailbox and require some manual actions at the end.

A
Contributor
Yes, this is something that needs to be addressed sooner than later. This is quite important and critical for teams that are dynamic and work across many multi products. Hoping that Freshdesk can put time into the important improvements like this!
P
Community Debut

Hi.  Not quite sure what you guys are up to but I have read multiple threads over the last few hours, all addressing the "Agent ouf of office" problem. We're are currently facing it ourselves. We just deployed this to our agents YESTERDAY and it's already a problem.


Anyhow, I figure that simply a flag on an agent in the Agent selection dropdowns would suffice enough to make sure people dont assign stuff to Agents who are out of office. A simple management tool where you either check yourself out (as with the livechat) or pre-define some period where you will be absent. Any of these, and a minimum, viable product of it would help greatly.


Another solution, which might be more sufficient, is to enable Policies (like the SLA ones) where you can setup a rule for what's to happen when an issues is assigned to someone OOO.


Currently (we're on Blossom plan) none of earlier suggested methods can help us.


This cannot seriously be 5 years of development to implement, right? 

M
Community Debut
  • mick.lowe
  • Community Debut
  • September 17, 2018

Hi


We are also having problems with holidays, this was first raised 6 years ago and I can't believe nothing has been done about it. This is meant to be customer service software, what service are providing if a ticket is allocated to somebody who has just started a 2 week holiday? 

A
Contributor
  • adam.tounjel
  • Contributor
  • September 18, 2018

Hi Mick


I raised this with a few of their product managers at a customer forum last week in Sydney and gave some ideas to develop an"Agent Leave" feature. We are currently managing this manually with an administrator re-assigning all tickets to other agents and enabling an observer rule to redirect any re-opened tickets (from customer responses) to other agents. It works but it is very cumbersome to do (we have 100 agents), hence why the request for a solution within agent management for supervisors and up.


Adam

R
Community Debut
  • rpresley
  • Community Debut
  • November 8, 2018

I got an email that a topic I was following got merged into this one, and yet I don't see any sign of it here. Am I missing something? It was a similar request of a similar age but included several use cases that may or may not be captured here, and I'm curious if those insights are now gone forever?

A
Contributor
  • adam_18603
  • Contributor
  • March 19, 2019

+1!

C
Community Debut
  • chaosrecords
  • Community Debut
  • May 3, 2019

Great.

I get to spend my vacation, replying to tickets telling them im on vacation because I cant turn off new tickets to go to me?


I cant remove myself because Im admin


So Either way i have to do work.. redirecting tickets to other users.


Its been six years and no "agent away" option still?




O
Contributor
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John, that sounds strange. I am also admin, but when I am away I get new tickets sent to someone else. Depends on how you get new tickets:

  • Email notification is configured in Admin >> Helpdesk Productivity >> Email notifications >> Agent Notifications >> New ticket created,  and then bottom of the screen: Notify Agent.
  • If they are automatically assigned to you, I assume you have set up a Dispatch'r rule.
Hope you enjoy a break ...
L
Contributor
  • liz.aitken
  • Contributor
  • May 7, 2019

@Mark I don't know about John specifically but it's not new tickets that are the problem as far as this discussion is concerned. We often have tickets that take a long time (more than 1 day) to resolve.

We want to get a good solution to "in Progress" tickets that are already underway when an agent goes on leave.


At the moment we are working around this by having a unique Observer rule for each team member, which we have to manually enable when that person is on holiday. This rule detects if there are new replies on any tickets assigned to that agent and then emails the rest of the team to ask them to review the new reply so that it is not missed.

O
Contributor
Forum|alt.badge.img+7

@Liz I fully agree that a solution for the assigned tickets is necessary.

My comment was to help John as his problem is specifically new tickets, and there I think the current possibilities are sufficient.

M
Community Debut
  • mick.lowe
  • Community Debut
  • May 7, 2019

There are 2 problems here, firstly, agents are assigning tickets to agents who are either on holiday or off sick or on-site and secondly replies sent to agents in the same 3 situations are getting missed. The Observer rule is a poor workaround to what I consider a fundamental feature missing from the software and as its been pointed out numerous times this is not 5 years worth of development. Our users of Freshdesk have grown considerably since we took it on and this problem is getting worse as we grow.


Can we have some input from Freshdesk please.

D
Contributor
Forum|alt.badge.img+5

The observer rule works for us and is simple to manage, we actually put tickets back in our ticket queue by removing the OOO Agent from the ticket and setting the status back to Open.


If you use Auto Allocation of tickets I suspect this isn't a great option and I can definitely see the need to set your status to OOO however in a large organisation this could potentially be abused if its Agent controlled vs Admin controlled.


Come on Freshdesk, make this happen!

C
Community Debut
  • chaosrecords
  • Community Debut
  • May 7, 2019

I found an easy workaround myself....

As an agent I went to my profile and where my assigned groups were.. I just removed my name from them.


My old tickets still are assigned to me.

Nobody has ability to assign new ones to me, so they all automatically go to my co-worker.
I wonder if he will ever notice?  =)

M
Community Debut
  • mick.lowe
  • Community Debut
  • May 8, 2019

@JohnZ that involves remembering to do it and then remembering to undo it - most people will forget to add themselves back into the groups which isn't ideal. It still all comes back to the fact a fairly fundamental part of the system is missing - how many companies don't allow there staff to have holidays??

S
Contributor
  • sidhanathb
  • Contributor
  • October 11, 2019

Hi Erik,


You can use FreshEngage (Trial version also available) App published in Freshdesk Marketplace. In your case this app can solve problem you are facing. FreshEngage have feature to recommend Agent for particular tickets based on agents previous work. refer this link https://www.aikonlabs.com/products/#product-freshdesk-section for more info or you can contact on sidhanathb@aikonlabs.com for more info.


Thanks,

Sidhanath

A
Active Contributor
  • antony.pain
  • Active Contributor
  • December 12, 2019

Hi All,


An app was published recently called "Out Of Office" which we'll eb looking to implement in the future to help manage annual leave etc.

https://www.freshworks.com/apps/freshdesk/out_of_office/


I installed it to have a look and to be honest, the menus aren't very intuative and I noticed that once you listed an "Out Of Office" you can't remove it. However, it may be very useful to some of you by the looks of it.


Good luck all, have a good day!

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