Can an agent be marked as absent to enable ticket diversion?

Question

Hello

Is there a way to mark or classify an agent as absent so that if they have open requests that get replied to while they are on holidays these can be handled with an auto reply, and then other agents notified to take over via an automation rule?

What I want to do is this:

When one of my agents go on holidays, not to have to transition a status but setup an automation rule that for all the issues where they are the assignee do this:

when the reporter (or request participants) make a comment,

an auto reply is sent to the reporter and all request participants informing that the agent is on holidays and someone else will help them meanwhile.

Would it work actually to define a group that is called e.g. "vacation"  and add agents into this group only when they are absent?

Then put an IF clause on the automation rule that "IF the assignee is in group "vacation"  - then the rule is activated?

I am in a nextgen JSM project so if anyone can help me with some concrete ways to setup these criteria correctly for the IF conditions that trigger the notification being sent that would be super helpful :)

also related question: is it better here to use the action "Add Comment"  or " Send Email"  to notify the customer?

If I use " Add comment"  and specify that is public the reporter gets this as an email anyway, so it should be enough right? I find that send email is perhaps less personal and I also struggle with having less variables that can be added to create the autoreply text.

Thanks for all suggestions!

Steph Bannister · Accepted Answer

So Update, I found a way simlar to what I described above.

1. created a group called "vacation"

2. when agents are on holidays they get moved into this group - the drawback here is that an admin needs to do it. would be best if users could mark themselves in and out of this group when they are going on or coming back from vacation.

3. the IF block of the automation rule checks if the ticket assignee is in the group vacation when a comment is left on the ticket (i.e. if the customer writes to the request),

4. The Action triggered is an auto reply (as comment added to request) is sent to the person who left the comment. (also a status transition to waiting for support in our case).

5. the IF else block is essentially then the same with the vacation group condition removed and the action thereafter is status transition. (or one could just do nothing).

So far it looks like request participants somehow don't get the notification that the autoreply comment was added but that could be linked to our notification settings.

I would still prefer to set this up in a more elegant way than having to move the assignee agent into a vacation group. I am thinking this could be achieved with a tag/ label that the agent adds to the request (e.g/ "vacation" ) then the rule can look for that value in the label category instead - this way the onus is on the Agents to mark and unmark their requests when they go on leave and will get away from the admins having to do this work.