Best way to handle HR case assignments when agent is temporarily out-of-office

[Joseph Gabriel]

What is the best-practice method to prevent assignment of HR cases to an agent who is temporarily out-of-office (e.g. sick, vacation, etc.)?  Assume that assignment is performed normally using matching rules and manual re-assignment.

[erik_brostrom]

From a process perspective, I would never have any record (task, incident, hr, anything) assign automatically to a individual, but rather a queue of individuals; then they can be grabbed on a by availability basis and worked that way.

Managing others queues when out can be easily done via having a dashboard/reports checking the last updated time and or responsibilities assigned to team members to cover other(s) queues when out (i.e. a buddy system). It really comes down to what is the process for managing the teams workload instead of tooling a solution for people being OOO etc, in my opinion.

[saracraddock]

We are also looking at solutioning for agent OOO currently as we are trying to further automate the assignment process and cater for global teams. I understood there might be an option for agents to add their schedules in SN, I don't recall the exact name but thought it was agent calendar or agent work & schedule status. Might be worth a look for the planned out of office time in your scenario too.

[ditavaclavikova]

Hi, I am also interested in finding a solution for the above.

Currently our cases get assigned to agents based on their skills first and then their queue. 

[Rob Sestito]

Hey Joe and everyone else looking on how to handle OOO users.

Just a quick Note, we do not really use the auto assignment rules just yet. We have a few HR Services that will automatically be assigned to someone when the certain Service is selected, but that is the extent of it.

But, when it comes to someone being OOO for whatever reason, I have built the following:

One the user table: (made a little OOO Section)

Basically for here, the user knows they will be OOO, they check the box to make it true and then enter in their dates for being gone.

Then, you will need to create two Dictionary Overrides for both HR Case and HR Task (if you want them to not be allowed to be assigned both), from the Assigned To field:

Note: Showing just hr case table, hr task table would be the same, just on its table

Next, I built a Scheduled Job to run, based on the OOO fields from the user table:

This process works for us with no issues. If you want to go a little further, you can create a notification to be sent to the Assignment Group Manger when a user uses this feature. Overall, it blocks the person using OOO feature, to not be selected as the Assigned To of a Case or Task. However again, we aren't deeply using the HR Skills/Auto assignment right now.

I hope this helps someone!

Let me know if you have any questions I can try to answer for you regarding this.

Cheers,

-Rob