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[Zendesk Talk] Option to Upload a "Holiday" Outside Schedule Voicemail
Answered
Posted Apr 10, 2018
For us the option to upload Outside schedule greetings for holidays, which are set up in the schedule, is missing. Currently the standard "Outside schedule" Voicemail applies.
This means the only way to have another greeting is uploading the greeting before the holiday and re-place it again by the standard greeting afterwards.
This can be very tiring and is error prone if you have multiple schedules and different country/language lines.
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44 comments
Gerardo
Agree with everyone, an extra option voicemessages for holidays.
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Ease
Like the others, this has been brutal for us as well.
I was considering a workaround of using a separate "Holiday IVR" and having that IVR be the holiday specific message with only 1 option to press 1 to continue, and then having that dump to our various lines/existing IVRs... That way I was planning to only update the primary IVR for each line. Has anyone tried something similar?
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Andrew Sarver
The fact that ZenDesk has not included this extremely basic feature to provide the best service for their customers is really disappointing. It's hard to imagine such a basic feature, being requested for 3 years, and those requests being ignored.
I've never worked with a phone system that didn't have the ability to set custom greetings for holidays in advance.
The last thing I want to do on Monday is get up on my day off and change the voicemail greeting in ZenDesk to reflect the Memorial Day Holiday.
Please add this feature ASAP so that we can take a true day off ZenDesk!
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IT Admin
It's crazy that I have to run numbers through Microsoft Teams just to be able to set Holidays in advance so that I don't have to do it on my weekend. This feature seems like a no-brainer and I hope that you reevaluate it in the near future.
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Kyle K.
+1. Seems like a pretty standard feature for any phone system yet it's been a request for over 5 years?
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Brandon (729)
Be the change you want to see in the world.
This post always comes back up for me during the holidays. In fact, back in 2019, I commented shared my frustration in needing to manually update the Out of Office voicemail greetings for Holiday closures (and then manually update them back after the Holiday). While Zendesk does allow you to bulk update your voicemail greetings, this unfortunately only applies to your inside of hours greetings and, when you're on holiday, you're not in the office.
Today, I'm thrilled to share that my latest app, HolidayZ VM Swapper, is now available in the Zendesk marketplace! As many have asked for here, this app can programmatically look through all of your phone lines and swap your standard greeting for your holiday one (or vice versa).
For any admins who work on an instance with multiple lines, hopefully this saves you a considerable amount of time! You do, however, still need to remember to switch them back.
While we're on the topic of holiday schedules, I'd also like to call your attention to the app that started my Zendesk development journey: HolidayZ, which allows you to programmatically add all of the 2024-25 public holidays by country to your schedules in bulk. Remember, Zendesk holidays don't roll over year over year!
Feedback on either app is welcome privately or in the marketplace. Happy HolidayZ!
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Tobias Hermanns
HI Brandon!
We used HolidayZ before it was a time saver, but it also had some limits i.e. Germany was imported some bank holiday only happen in few area of Germany, so we are open and wondering in afternoon why no one calls us. Anyway such side affect was less compare to searching and adding them all manually.
Regarding your new App, we still looking for something can do the same but for "ad-hoc" situation i.e. We have an Team Meeting and want ad-hoc close hotline for an hour.
Or another situation is we have some on-going know issue we want add this one line before IVR starts.
Do you think such a scenario would be doable in further App?
Some tricky scenario could be multilanguage, we use TTS for now, but for ad-hoc I think English on all lines are fine, have i.e. another Waiting music could may workaround this already!
Thanks for your feedback.
Tobias
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Brandon (729)
Hey Tobias,
Thanks for your feedback!
Re: HolidayZ limitations - unfortunately this is known as the app relies on a public database of holidays that is not nuanced enough to get into regional, but I'm glad you've found it to be an overall time saver!
Re: Temporary Line Greeting Changes Inside Of Hours - You can actually handle this in the UI natively by updating the associated Voicemail greeting with your lines as needed (just don't forget to switch it back!) https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821594650-Managing-outgoing-greetings#topic_eft_dgd_yt Note the recommended best practice is to keep something generic such as "all available agents are assisting other callers." This could be true for callers that max their time in queue, or if all agents are at happy ho.... I mean in a meeting.
Re: Alerting via the IVR: This could be achieved by recording a temporary IVR greeting that includes the message followed by your standard IVR options "We're currently experiencing X issue, for sales press one, for support press 2." You could then associate the greeting temporarily with your phone lines, reverting back when the issue is resolved.
RE: Multi-language and TTS, I agree it does get tricky - but leveraging the wait greeting with custom hold music + messaging is a great workaround!
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Shawna James
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Michelle Henchoz
Don't understand why this isnt seen as an essential feature, its poor service for customers to ring up out of hours and if voicemails are turned off to just hear that no one is available and to call back, they may just keep calling until they get too frustrated and give up. This needs to be added soon as a basic feature.
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Nick
We like the IVR function with Talk but need a way to clearly show and state to our customers they're calling in on a Holiday. Logically this can only be solved by having an outside schedule/holiday option within the IVR ~ API is not feasible. This is very important to us.
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Joshua Bentley
Nick - our solution isn't a great one, but we basically do what you're suggesting. We have holidays hours configured in our business rules schedule then before each holiday we manually change the closed message. We have recorded messages for all of our closed holidays. Not a great workaround, I know, but it's what we have.
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Linda Grosskreuz
I want to vote for this too.
We launched Zendesk this year, not expecting that a key feature of every telephone solution ist not extisting (basic answering machine greeting für different occasions and not just the greetings outside business hours).
We need to schedule exceptional closures for training sessions, corporate events, holidays and want to let our customers know, why they cannot reach us.
The solutions proposed today are not satisfactory!
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Sheryl Doluna
Our office will be closed tomorrow for the holiday, and here I am, waiting for the clock to hit 11:55 PM PST so I can manually update the IVR greeting. It's 2025, and I’m still doing this by hand!
Is there any update on the feature request? Will this be added to the roadmap, or is the response we received back in 2022 still the final word for 2025?
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