Out of office for agents

 In my opinion it should work like:

Agents sets OOO message and time period

It is not possible to assign ticket to him

Requester while trying to contact with an Agent is informed back about OOO

Even better, setting OOO could have another agent or team of agents "cover" for the OOO agent.  "covering" agents would see OOO agent's tickets as part of their own queue.

Is there a solution for this topic? We are facing the same issues

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Isn't that what delegation does under a user's profile settings?

^ I think that's only for approvals

Workforce Management is definitely one area that Freshservice is lacking in. Trying to ensure our customers are receiving timely responses is very important to us and being able to take some kind of automated action on tickets if an agent is out of office would be very beneficial.

It would be good to have that function.

spanish dictionary

+1. I was searching for this exact feature. I have several agents out on training for a week. Right now, I need to use an available team member to re-route tickets that are assigned to the agents out on training. 

I want the system to automatically re-route their tickets to a certain group, and make it impossible for the system to initially assign tickets to them. 

We have our system set up right now which avoids assigning any tickets to any one person, and instead assigns it to an agent group even if the work is for one specific person. This is solely because of the lack of OOO, so that would be a great feature to have.

I'm not sure you want a requester ever to get an OOO form a service/help desk as doesn't look great. I think a workaround is to make sure status Observer/automater rules are set correctly and that agents are setting the status correctly on all ticket actions then use escalation rules? We also get agents to check their MS Teams or Outlook groups in the morning for their fellow agents status that day and then use the appropriate shared views that we have set up to show agents in your group and tickets in an open status.

I would always steer away from leaving tickets unassigned as this leads to a lack of ownership of incidents/requests in my experience if you use the status field and set escalations this can easily be avoided.

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I created for each agent of us a special OOO Observer rule - this need to be de/activated manually each time!

Checking if a update/reply is sent to ticket and if agent is assigned to specific agent, then set to none/open and inform us via slack

It would also be nice to be able for the agent to specify their availability for auto-assignment of tickets.

We have have a small team so one person is on call after we close at 5pm.   Currently we don't want people turning auto-assign off and on as it's easy to forget to turn it on, so we have everyone leave it active, but if the system could only assign tickets that come in after 4pm to the people that work until 5pm and then only to the on-call person if they are URGENT if it is after 5pm and then when we open at 7am, it would only assign to people that are here and then at 8am when everyone is in the office it uses current logic, would be a better customer experience.

A way for the user to enter their days off in this tool or that it integrates wtih the O365 calendar when they are marked OUT OF OFFICE would be a wonderful enhancement for us.

In another major incident management system, Service-Now, they actually had a schedule that could be set by the agent that basically allowed them to delegate their assignments during their out of the office duration to another agent.  Everything was still assigned to them and could actively continued to be assigned to them, but the system would show the agent's work assignments in the other designated agent's queue.  You just set a beginning and ending and the system took care of the rest.  

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