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Out of Office

  • Updated

Out of Office enables you to create business rules around the agent's availability.

For example, you might want to automatically unassign an agent's open tickets when they become unavailable. Round Robin can then pick up the unassigned tickets and redistribute them to available agents.

How it works

This feature works by adding an out of office tag (such as agent_ooo) to the agent's open tickets when their status is changed to a busy status. You can create triggers based on the tag to unassign tickets or take some other action. It's similar to Zendesk's Out of Office app, but it leverages the agent's status in Playlist instead of a checkbox field in Zendesk, providing more of a seamless experience for agents.

To use this feature, go to Playlist Setup > Round Robin > Out of Office. Click on Enabled. Once enabled, you'll have access to a few settings. 

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Settings

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Out of office tag

Required. The tag that should be added to open tickets when an agent becomes unavailable. By default, the tag is agent_ooo (same tag used by Zendesk's Out of Office app). 

Add tag on status

Choose the busy statuses that should trigger Out of Office. If a status is not selected, Out of Office will not trigger when an agent's status is manually changed to a busy status.

Add tag on automatic idle

If you're using Automatic idle, you can enable this option to automatically trigger Out of Office when an agent becomes unavailable due to Automatic idle. This is especially useful for social messaging channels like WhatsApp where tickets should be reassigned as soon as possible if the agent becomes inactive.

Internal note

Private comment to be added to open tickets when an agent becomes unavailable. This can be useful if you need to leave some kind of note as to why the ticket was unassigned/reassigned. If the field is left blank, a comment will not be added.

Remove tag when agent becomes available

Although not it's not a common use case, you can enable this option to automatically remove the out of office tag from the agent's tickets when they become available. This option should only be used if your workflow requires you to preserve the assignee (instead of unassigning tickets) when the agent is out of office. Otherwise, leave it disabled to avoid making unnecessary calls to Zendesk's API.

Here's an example scenario of when this might be useful:

  1. Agent sets their status to Invisible right before going on a long vacation.
  2. The tag agent_ooo is automatically added to the agent's open tickets and the assignee is preserved (tickets are not unassigned).
  3. Other team members work on the agent's open tickets tagged with agent_ooo while the agent is on vacation.
  4. When the agent returns to the office and goes Online, the agent_ooo tag is automatically removed from any of the agent's tickets that are still open (not resolved by other team members while the agent was on vacation).
  5. Other team members will no longer touch the agent's remaining open tickets because the agent_ooo tag has been removed.

Create trigger based on your OOO tag

Once you've configured Out of Office, you can create triggers based on your out of office tag. 

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