Admin or Workspace Manager Rights Required
This feature is enabled for Admins and Workspace Managers.
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. These events should have a 24-hour slot, with no gaps, and they can also be a series/recurrent. 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?
Expand "Settings" on the left menu, then click "Distribution Settings".
Also, it's important to mention that these settings are defined based on 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 cancelation happened through a public cancel URL or if the meeting was deleted/canceled in your calendar provider.
Vacation Adjustment
This setting can be adjusted to determine how Chili Piper should behave while a rep is on vacation and also when they return:
-
Enabled: Users on vacation are paused from receiving meetings while away. Their position in the Round-Robin remains the same, and they will not receive catch-up meetings when they return.
- Disabled: Users on vacation are paused from receiving meetings while away. When they return, their count of meetings will be caught up relative to other team members.
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 for 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 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). It will include him back on January 29th (one day before the vacation ends) to start booking meetings from January 30th onwards.
If you use "0" in both or one of the above buffers, the rep will be removed and 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 even 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 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.