Vacation and Distributions Credits & Adjustments

Vacation and distribution settings make it easy to define how the distribution should occur across your workspaces, reps, and how Chili Piper products should behave during vacation periods.

We will cover the workspace's vacation and distribution settings in more detail below.

Table of Contents:

• How do the Products Handle Vacations?
• How do I access the Distribution Settings?
• Credit Assignees
• Vacation Adjustment
• Vacation Buffer
• Distribution Cycle

How do Chili Piper Products Handle Vacations?

Chili Piper can read vacation time automatically on a rep's calendar if they have blocked their calendar using all-day busy events or have back-to-back events marked as busy. These events should have a 24-hour slot, with no gaps, and they can also be series/recurrent. If they are free for at least 15 minutes, then they are considered not on vacation. Partial OOO blockers (i.e., 9 AM to 3 PM) are not considered a vacation period or vacation day(s).

When a rep has the 24-hour blocker on their calendar, Chili Piper will skip that User in the Team round-robin to a different rep during this time.

If all reps happen to be on vacation at the same time, for example, on December 25th, Chili Piper will not route the prospect.

How do I access the Distribution Settings?

Go to Distributions then Credits & Adjustments

Also, it's important to mention that these settings are defined based on the workspace, meaning you can have different settings per workspace as you wish.

Credit Assignees

These settings are meeting-related and can be adjusted to define how Chili Piper should act on certain scenarios and how they can impact your Team's Distribution.

Since these settings are meeting-related, it means they will not be applied to Distro.

• If meeting is marked as “no show”: If enabled, this setting will credit back one meeting to an Assignee in Round Robin distribution if a meeting is marked as 'No Show'. 
  
  
• If meeting is canceled: If enabled, this setting will credit back one meeting to an Assignee in Round Robin distribution if a meeting is canceled.
  A meeting is considered canceled if the cancellation happened through a public cancellation URL or if the meeting was deleted/canceled in your calendar provider.

Vacation Adjustment

Vacation Adjustment helps manage how distributions are handled when a Team Member is on vacation. A vacation is automatically detected when a Team Member’s calendar is blocked continuously for at least 24 hours.

• Catch up: The Team Member’s level in Distributions will remain unchanged while they are away. When they return, they will immediately be placed at the front of the queue to receive conversations, meetings, or records until they are caught up. This ensures they don’t fall behind on their assigned workload.
• Do not catch up: The Team Member’s level in Distributions will be adjusted during their vacation. When they return, they will re-enter the queue at the current level, meaning they will not receive any catch-up conversations, meetings, or records. This option ensures a smoother distribution flow for the rest of the team without overloading the returning Team Member.

Find additional details below about how the vacation can impact the distribution:

• If a user is OOO, they will not receive any meetings through the round-robin.
  
  
• If all users in a Team are OOO simultaneously, Chili Piper will display the first available slot when at least one Team member is back.
  
  For example, suppose Joe and Mary are from the same Team and Distribution. Joe is OOO from September 5th to September 10th, and Mary is OOO from September 5th to September 15th. If a prospect is distributed to their Team while they are OOO, the first available slot would be September 10th, when John returns from their OOO period.
  
  
• If a record matches via Ownership Rules during the object owner's vacation, we will still assign it to the owner and show their calendar.

Vacation Buffer

This setting specifies how many days before vacation starts reps are removed from distribution and how many days before vacation ends they are re-added to distribution:

For example, suppose that John Doe is leaving on vacation from January 15th to January 30th. The screenshot above shows that the vacation buffer is set to 1 before and after.

In this scenario, the round-robin algorithm will disregard John on January 14th (one day before starting the vacation period). He will be included again on January 29th (one day before the vacation ends) to start booking meetings or receiving assignments from January 30th onwards.

If you use "0" in either or both of the above buffers, the rep will be removed and then added back to the distribution on the same days they started their vacation.

Still using John Doe's example above, if the buffers are set to 0, John will stop receiving objects on January 15th and start receiving them again on January 30th.

If a buffer is longer than a vacation period, for example, "5" is used as the buffer, and the rep has a 4-day vacation, the User will not be removed from distribution.

Last, you can use different numbers in each buffer, as the starts and ends do not necessarily need to be the same.

Distribution Cycle

You can reset your round-robin fairness algorithm in a pre-defined cycle or never reset it. 

There are three reset options available:

• Monthly: Reset happens on the first day of each month.
  
  
• Quarterly: Reset happens automatically on the first day of each pre-defined month. In the Reset Month setting below, you can define which months the algorithm will be reset:
  
  
  
• Never: The distribution numbers will never be reset.

For Monthly and Quarterly options, the following should be considered as well:

• You must define the timezone considered to happen during this reset. For example, if your company is CST-based, you would probably like to have the distribution reset at midnight CST monthly or quarterly.
  
  
• The reset will happen at midnight in the selected timezone, on the first day of each month (Monthly), or the first month of each quarter (Quarterly).
  
  
• If you switch from Monthly to Quarterly (or vice versa), current distribution stats won't reset immediately. You can view the last reset date on the Reporting page.