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Installing and using the Out of Office app



Edited Dec 17, 2024


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46 comments

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

Adding my voice to the others requesting that someone other than Admin should be able to set other agents as out of office. Admin access is WAY too much access for this small task!

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Since the app update to V2 in 2019 we have experienced almost daily issues with tickets remaining in agent Views when the agents are set to Unavailable. This bug has caused many frustrating experiences for our customers and has prevented us from maintaining our SLA on multiple occasions. I opened a ticket about this in Oct 2019. Finally in January of 2020 we received this response:

Unfortunately it looks like you're running into a bug in the app. The good news is that our devs are already working on fixing it.

This in June of 2020:

Our engineers are still exploring the best way to fix the underlying issue here. I've let them know that this remains a big problem for you (and other customers), and I'm waiting to hear back from them on their plans moving forward.

And now finally this update:

We have received confirmation from our app developer team that there are no immediate plans to address the OOO app's underlying infrastructure and the behavioral limitations that we previously discussed will unfortunately remain in place going forward.

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Mandy C,

We to are very upset at the lack of support for this App.  We made a decision to stop using the App since it caused pain for not only our Agents but our Customers too.  The period of time that has lapsed without fixing the many issues is unacceptable.  

My guess is the ZD App Developer Team is never out of the office or they do not utilize the App.

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

HI everyone - 

Just a reminder that the proper place to provide feedback is in the community. Here's the official thread for feedback on the Out of Office app.

This is the space that product managers will be following and responding to feedback going forward. 

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@... Zendesk has been making so many product changes during last 2 years. So it feels like they don’t have enough resources to support all products. We’re getting many such customer customer support replies :(.

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I'm having trouble with the app.

Does other people have the same issue ?

I installed it in production & set an agent as unavailable.

I waited on the web page till it said "Error, some tickets not updated etc etc" 

Then I looked to the cases:

I've 222 cases assigned to this agent for which 26 cases didn't received the tag "Agent_ooo".

In my view I removed the "problems" to be sure that wasn't the issue. 

 

What can be the reason ? 

Because thats more than 10% issue rate. 

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This trigger not adding agent_ooo tag to tickets which are assigned to the agent when agent set him as unavailable.  please suggest 

 

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Sabra

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Anita Rajkumar! Depending on how many tickets the agent had assigned to them, it could take a bit before you see the update reflected in the ticket. As mentioned in the article, updating 5000 assigned tickets can take up to 8 minutes. Also, if you don't have the  Surface errors encountered when bulk updating tickets? setting enabled, I would recommend doing so. Enabling this option causes the unassign process to take longer, but it will surface any errors encountered while updating tickets so that they can be addressed. If you have specific example that you would like us to look into, feel free to open up a ticket with us so we can investigate further!

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Hi, is it possible to set up a trigger when an agent marks themselves as out of office, all of their current, pending on hold and open tickets are assigned to a selected agent.

We have a system in place where by an agent works Monday to Friday and then passes their tickets an agent who works weekends.

It would be great if we could make this an automatic process using this app.

 

 

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Hi, Joe,

Yes, I think you can. We have a trigger that is based upon the tag that Out of Office app use:

So put this and all other conditions you want in the trigger to perform the action you need it to do. 👍

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Thank you Kristain, that worked well.

Joe

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Your welcome. I'm glad to hear that!

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We have begun using the Out of Office App but some agents are not seeing the notice that an agent is unavailable. We've tried updating Google Chrome but the box still does not appear for certain users. Any suggestions on this?

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Luke,
 
You can check your app settings to determine if there are any restrictions in place. 
 

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I tried uninstalling the OOO app to isolate testing a related issue.  The app is not showing on the Zendesk apps page, and the 2 "OOO" triggers were removed, but the [Out of Office] Agent out checkbox is still on the User fields list.

- I deactivated the field, but I cannot delete it.  
- I reactivated the field and then tried to delete, but that did not work either.

We want to reinstall the OOO app, but the task failed because of an error: Validation failed: Key: agent_ooo has already been taken.  I had previously checked Rule Analysis, and I removed all instances of the agent_ooo tag.  Thus far, Zendesk Support has not been able to help - wondering if anyone else has a suggestion?

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Audrey Ann Cipriano

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Jamie! I'm sorry you're experiencing this! I see you have raised a ticket as well and we're still investigating this issue for you, rest assured we'll provide an update in the ticket as soon as we found the root cause of the issue. Thanks for your patience!

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I am hoping you can give me a better idea of what the Surface errors encountered  when bulk updating tickets? feature looks like when it happens.  Is it a similar notification in the agent view to these?

Also, has anyone encountered any functionality issues with this feature such as the application timing out?  We are hoping to enable this feature but want to be sure we fully understand how it is going to work for agents. 

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My team is a bit of a minimalist and, when going through apps to remove from the sidebar, noticed there's no way to remove the Out of Office App without uninstalling it; we want to keep it, just remove a bit of its redundancy (i.e. it already has Out of Office buttons on your Profile and left sidebar, we just want to remove it from the right sidebar).

Is there a way to remove it from the right sidebar without uninstalling it? If not, consider this query as a feature request ❤️

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Michelle,

It is similar to the one you have provided. In addition, we can also help with any issues that you may experience if you decided to use the OOO app for it's Zendesk developed.

Hi Doug,

As it turns out, we don't have that feature yet to hide it from the Apps sidebar.

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Dane , is it in the roadmap to allow for admin override.  i.e.  As a manager of support, I want the agent who is OOO to handle an issue next week, when they are back from vacation.

I do like how if a requester replies to an assigned ticket while the assignee is out, it unassigns it, but it should be feasible to re-assign it back after review by the greater team or management. 

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Hello,

Our team uses this app and has 'Force unassign tickets?' turned on but we've found that it does not unassign tickets that open up in an agent's working queue back to the main queue for another agent to take. This was working originally, but hasn't worked in a good year for us. What could we be doing wrong?

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We're seeing the same this as you Melissa Boyle, it would be good to know if there is a problem with the functionality of this app.

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How can I include open tickets?   Currently it only shows Pending and on Hold.  I want all statuses assisgned to the user to get the tag

 

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Gabriel Manlapig

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi John,

We noticed that you have submitted a separate conversation and our team is already handling this inquiry regarding Out of Office v2 app. You should receive a notification moving forward once our team responded on the ticket conversation that you have submitted.

Thank you!
 

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Gabriel Manlapig I have been working with support for two weeks on the issue and they still can't tell me how to set the tag on Open Tickets.   It works fine for solved, on-hold and pending but won't update the Open tickets.   I have tried creating different triggers but the only time it works is if I edit the ticket - which I would like automated.

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Hello,

I have been testing the App for our team for some time now. When I tried to set up some automation connected to the tags added by the App, some questions rose to me.
When the agent is set as unavailable, the tag was only added to tickets that were created by him. What I would have thought, is that the tag is added to tickets that are assigned to him. Is this just a misunderstanding by me?
We tried to create a "vacation" solution, where the ticket is assigned to the agent and if he is out of Office it will go to another agent or back to the group.

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Christine

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Schrader,

That is the expected behavior. Assigned tickets to an unavailable agent who sets their status using the OOO app won't re-assign, this is outlined as one of the limitations of the app in this article.
 
Using the agent_ooo tag, you can create a Trigger to re-assign tickets to agents/groups.

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Hi,

My support agents use the Out of Office app and we would like to know if it's possible to assign Pending tickets to them when they are OOO (since Pending tickets are awaiting a reply and don't need to be worked). This would prevent ticket queues from getting overloaded when agents cover for their OOO colleagues. Also, the covering agents don't have to remember to move the tickets back over when the OOO agent is back in the office.

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Mike DR

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Nike!
 
Did a test in my test environment and as long as the agent is unavailable, tickets won't be assigned to them regardless of the status. Did try to look for a workaround but those didn't work. 
 
Product feedback would be great and I'll also do my part to notify our team about this neat feature your team requires.

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This article needs to be updated with the new [Out of Office] Agent Out? feature released within a profile. It's nice because agents, rather than admins, can set themselves as away; however, I would like to better understand the behavior of this checkbox. 

  • Does it automatically unassign all open tickets? When doing this via the Out of Office app, the agent has the option to select this. There is no selection option with the checkbox. 
  • Does it auto-apply the agent_ooo tag when doing via the checkbox, similar to the OOO app?
  • Can agents adjust other agents out of office by using this checkbox on a fellow agent's profile? 

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