Out of Office

Please find a definitive and solid solution for this very old issue?

Eric

I would also like to see this fixed. Aside from re-opening a closed ticket (which can be closed again), one frustration I have is that it looks like the customer has responded. I scan my open tickets to see if a customer has responded or not (whether they have a blue response tag or not). If they have then i know I need to respond to them. An out office is not a response that I need to act on but there is no way of deleting it from the thread or marking the thread as the customer has not responded.

Hello,

Apologies for being late with our reply.

We understand it wouldn't be ideal for a ticket to reopen when an auto-responder is received. A solution to prevent the ticket from re-opening using observer rule has already been suggested by Manoj in one of the previous replies. Auto-responders could contain useful information from the customer. For example, a customer could provide an alternate contact information or if the customer is not available in the coming days, you will know when you need to reach out to them next. These are crucial information for an agent which is why they are appended to the same ticket. 

Thanks!

Ramya,

That is not a solution to this problem.  The issue arises because of the way Freshdesk analyses the Subject Line of an email.  There must be a unique key variable that is identifiable in the header information of the email that can tell Freshdesk that no matter what the subject is, this is indeed the same email stream.

Gmail can do it.  That's how they keep track of conversation threads.

If the ticket is created based on only the Subject, it is fallible.  There needs to be a common identifier (perhaps in the body?).

Guys, as a work-around, I have just disabled the New Ticket notification, but this is not a long-term solution.

Couldn't you just add the possibility in the criteria to add the X-fields of the header proposed above and use the same rule as proposed?

(instead of using Subject line - which is by they way not even visible in Freshdesk?)

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 intuitive 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!

I looked into that, that's for agents setting up a way to alert other agents not to assign them tickets because they are out.

I've changed our auto response too, but I'd also like to add the need for something more baked in.  We have several automatic systems that send emails to our helpdesk AND the user (notifications of account activity, training emails, ESA issues) and if they're out it creates a new ticket.  So just having a method that watches the reply isn't going to help.

Between enterprises, different companies, the OOO response is generally not accepted by mail servers if it doesn't match a known internal user.  I don't know the specifics at the moment, but there's got to be a message type that's being generated that can be used by FreshDesk to trigger an exception to any email.

Additionally, the subject doesn't contain "out of office."  The body might, but that can be customized by the user.  The SUBJECT says Automatic Reply: (Subject).