An idea would be maybe add it to your toggle for your status. If they select vacation as thier status it would give them an option to choose an agent to send tickets to. Just a thought.

It would be good to be able to catch replies to an agent that is not "on duty"

This would be helpful in both the Agent to Agent CHAT as well as updates to tickets owned by out of office agent and perhaps have option to notify the "Team"?

An option would also to be able to send an auto-reply.

This is something we are looking at implementing. Interested to know what your thinking on workflows would be; both for tickets that are already assigned to the agent and are "awaiting agent" and also tickets that are "awaiting user" but the user replies during the vacation period and they go "awaiting agent". We could look at having the agent configure who takes their tickets in their absence and a trigger that assigns tickets to their backup when they are out of office - but interested in other workflow ideas.

For me personally. My vision of this feature is the following. An agent goes on vacation for a week and wants all his new tickets responded to by either an automated response stating he is on vacation and/or it adds another agent to the ticket to answer the ticket. Here is a couple of my thoughts.
- I think maybe the option to either allow full takeover of the ticket or adding the agent taking over the tickets as a follower would be a nice option for the agent going on vacation.
- Adding a comment next to agents name on all open tickets that he is on vacation.
- Maybe it should be up to the ticket submitter. Agent sets status to on vacation. He picks replacement agent who would receive tickets in his absence. Then when the user is filling out his ticket maybe before he submits it, it alerts him the agent for this department is on vacation. Then the user has two choices use replacement agent or wait for assigned agent to return.

Those are a couple of my thoughts.

Some useful ideas there. One of the challenges is working out how much control an individual agent has on what happens when they go on vacation as opposed to an admin controlled global set of processes when an agent is on holiday.

I dont think it makes sense to give control of all open tickets to the agent taking over for the agent on vacation. I think any new tickets should be assigned to both with the one taking over as the follower. I think agent permissions would still control this. The agent going on vacation would have plenty of time leading up to his vacation to clean up tickets or let users know he is going on vacation he could also at that time add any agent he feels could contribute to the ticket as a follower.

Yes, although this setting would typically be used in the event of sickness which is unexpected - so we need a way to handle tickets already assigned to the agent that are awaiting agent.

I was ignoring the sickness part because its typically a day or two. I would agree that this would probably need to be handled on the admin side then. Unless you allow specific agents to take control of other agents. Kind of like when an agent is logged in they can log in as any user.

Perhaps this is then returned to the "Assigned Team" so that someone from the team can pick-up the request?

It would be interesting to see this feature implemented.

It could possibly be implemented with an 'away from desk' icon at the top of the agent screen (similar to when you log in and out of chat).

This would mean if a user was going into a meeting for an hour or something, they could click 'away from desk' which would remove them from the round robins they are in (like they are logged out) and it would log them out of chat.

Ability to specify your Agents working hours so that chats are not started if they forget to sign out at the end of the day.

An agent should be able to set his vacation / holidays time, so that Round Robin doesn't auto-assign tickets to this agent.