Out of Office templates (OOO) are a type of auto-responder that instruct eDesk to reply automatically to messages that arrive during one-off office closures, e.g., during a national holiday. Manage your customer's expectation by setting up eDesk to auto-respond to any messages that arrive when your offices are closed for a holiday.

This help file will guide you through creating Out of Office templates that will be sent automatically to customers during one-off office closures, such as during holiday periods.

Before you start

  • You’ll need to have access to Templates in your Settings in order to view, create and edit templates. If you don’t have access, you can request it from an Admin user within your business.  

01 Creating Out of Office Templates - General tab

To get started:

  1. Go to Settings > Smart Tools > Templates.

  2. Click + Add Template.

  3. Choose Out of Office as the template type.

Pro-tip: You can also create a new template from a copy of an existing template by selecting the ellipsis in the template's row.  

Template Setup

  • Template name: Give your template a clear, unique name.

  • Template Type: As this is an out-of-office template, you can just leave this setting on Consumer.

  • Active Template: Tick this box to activate the template. Inactive templates won’t be sent.

  • Message: Choose your primary language for the template and enter your OOO message in the message field. You can include text, links, and images. You can add further languages once your template has been created.

    • You don’t need to fill out the Subject field.

    • To personalise your message, insert Snippets like #consumer_firstname# from the right-hand list.
      Important: Be aware that snippets that contain customer information will not work on Amazon messages. 

    • If you include order-related snippets, you must define an Order Status in the Usage Conditions section later.

Pro Tip: Avoid using phrases like "We’re currently out of the office" or "Our office hours are 9-5pm". These can be flagged by marketplace SLA detectors. Instead, use a more neutral message like: "We’ve received your message and will be in touch shortly".

  • Add an attachment (optional): Upload an attachment if you want to include one. 

  • Attach Invoice (optional): Tick this box if you want to include the customer’s invoice with the reply.

Usage Conditions (Optional)


Use this section to limit when the template is sent - for example, only for a certain channel or ticket type. You can define:

  • Specific channels (if you leave Channels blank, the Out of Office will send to them all). 

  • Ticket types

  • Order statuses

Tags

If you want the ticket to be automatically tagged each time the Out of Office is sent, choose the tag here. This can be particularly useful for reporting or if you want to change the status of the ticket once the Out of Office is sent. Tagging the ticket means you can set up a Pinned Filter to find all of your Out of Office tagged tickets. 

02 Creating Out of Office templates - Out of Office tab

You now need to set when and how you want the Out of Office template to send. Click into the Out of Office tab of the template.


Date & Time Conditions - One off

To define when the auto-response should be active:

  1. Go to the Out of Office tab.

  2. Under Date & Time Conditions – One-off, click + Add date range.

  3. Select a start and end date and time for your OOO message.

  4. To add multiple periods (e.g. different holidays), click + Add date range again.

Autoresponder Options

These options control how and when the message is sent:

  1. Delay: Add a delay (in minutes) to make the auto-response feel more like a human is answering. This is particularly important for messages to marketplaces like Amazon and eBay who may have auto-reply detectors active that could stop the message from sending

    • e.g. 15 - 45 minutes = eDesk replies anytime between 15 - 45 minutes after the customer message is received.

  2. Frequency: Choose how often this template should reply to multiple incoming messages in the same ticket. This is important so that you do not get caught up in an auto-reply loop - which can happen if your customer has an auto-reply set up incorrectly.

    • Common setting: Autoreply to messages once every 12 or 24 hours for longer time-off periods.

  3. Exclude: Prevent auto-replies to specific emails (e.g. name@example.com) or whole domains (e.g. *@example.com)
     

  4. Include channel signature: Tick to include the channel signature at the end of the message.
    To find out more about creating signatures, click here.

Ticket Status

In this section, you can choose what happens to the ticket status after the Out of Office (OOO) auto-response is sent:

  • Using this template doesn't change the ticket status: The ticket will stay in To Do and may show as overdue in eDesk, even though the SLA will still update correctly (stop) on the marketplace.

  • Using this template changes the ticket status to Waiting: Useful if you don't want overdue tickets to show in eDesk, but remember to follow up once you're back - your customer might still be waiting for a response.

  • Using this template changes the ticket status to Closed: The ticket will be marked as resolved in eDesk. 

Tip: If you set the status to Waiting/Resolved, it’s a good idea to assign a Tag like OOO follow-up, then create a Pinned Filter for tickets with this tag and status. This makes it easy to find and follow up on these tickets when you're back in the office.

Finish set-up

Finally, click Create Template to save the new template.
As this is an auto-responder, you can ignore the AI tab in this template. 

All done! The new template is added to the list in Settings > Smart Tools > Templates and will be sent by eDesk during the specified date/time periods for tickets that match the Usage Conditions you have set.

Further Reading

To find out how to create a more general auto-reply, click here.
To learn more about Manual-Usage templates with eDesk, click here.
To find out how to use Rule only templates, click here.