We’re pleased to introduce an Away Timer, a new enhancement to the availability status selector in the Help Desk Workspace. Service seated users can now set themselves to “Away” for a specific time duration, after which they’ll automatically be returned to “Available” status. This reduces the risk of being left unavailable unintentionally and gives user greater control during short breaks.
Support teams often operate in fast-paced environments where brief pauses—scheduled or ad hoc—are necessary. However, it’s easy to forget to manually return to “Available” after a short step away. The new Away Timer ensures service seated users can confidently take a time-based break.
When a user is marked as “Available” in the Help Desk Workspace, they can now choose to:
Note: The Away Timer is honored over user's working hours, so if the user's working hours start while they are using the away timer they will continue to be marked as away until the timer expires. Users can still return early by manually switching back to Available at any time, which will cancel the timer.
While the timer is active, the availability status will actively countdown how long the user will stay in the away status.
This countdown is visible both to the user and in the Availability Management view. Admins with the appropriate permissions can change the user’s status to Available if needed, but cannot initiate a timed Away status on behalf of another user.
Note: Timed away statuses will appear and behave like standard “Away” statuses for filtering and reporting. They are excluded from “Away (OOO)” and “Away (Outside Working Hours)” filters.
The Away Timer is fully integrated into Service Reporting, including Summary Tab, Analyze Tab, and Service Analytics:
Service Professional, Service Enterprise