Currently out-of-office settings can only be managed by the agent itself. If now an agent is on sick leave tickets are stuck with him.
It would be great if there would be a role just for agent out-of-office management so this could be taken care of even if the agent is not there due to e.g. sickness.
Admins can already do this via the agents view and the setting in in profile settings, however this is more of a workaround than a solution. Also we would like to keep the number of Admins limited if possible.
Assignment timeouts for groups are also an option, but in our usecase only the agent and his replacements are usually in the loop for the ticket so if it goes back to the unassigned ticket pool it could create unnecessary workflow hiccups.
good point, this might be an option in some cases. However in the industry we are working in it often happens that customer replies will be delayed by a couple of days or even months due to several different factors. With assignment timeout or currently available trigger options this would mean that the agent will loose assignment of that ticket after e.g. 2 days of non activity. Using pending reminder is also no real option as the timespan varies from case to case.
In any way the assignment loss will be problematic as our tickets are mostly very specialized cases where only 1-3 agents are familiar with. So bouncing it back to the group is unfortunately not helpful.
It could work with triggers but then we would need a trigger option like:
If agent did not start session in 2 days (here a weekend and holiday exclusion would be needed) then assign tickets to his replacement agent.
This would require a editable list of replacement agents.
So however I turn it an automated solution sounds like a lot of rework of zammad code
The simplest solution to our use case that I can think of would be if we could give HR an “out-of-office” management account. So once an agent calls in sick HR can simply assign the replacement agent on demand.
If you give your HR or whoever is in charge the Admin-Right “Users”, we should be able to take over the agents session and enable the replacement settings. This is how we set this, if an Agents forgets for whatever reasons.
This is not perfect, but will at least give you an option.
You surely could also handle that by API.
Thank you for your input.
We are aware of the Admin option, but tbh I would like to keep HR out of Admin business
The API is a good hint. We could write a little tool for HR which would do what we want via API. Are there API functions to edit out-of-office settings for users?
I could not find this in the documentation
