Ability to have CTA Due Date exceptions for black-out dates (i.e. holidays) much like "skip all weekends"

@travis_floyd valid request, I am voting for this and redirecting to product team. 

@All, please up-vote here and show your interest on this enhancement. 

@sai_ram it would be great if the admin could create this and set it to the user as well. We are a global company and our EMEA, APAC, and North America teams have different holidays to consider

Hello there, this is a valid but niche use case. We will pick this up based on the upvotes. Thanks.

@sriram pasupathi  I do not think it is that niche of a use case. How weird would it be to get an email response from a CSM on a Saturday when they know our company is not in the office? Or on Christmas day when they receive an OOO reply?

If we want to use JO to scale our CSMs communication, it should align when a CSM would communicate which is not on a weekend or a company holiday. Other automation email programs have the ability to “black out” dates

@andreammelde I’m sorry I didn’t understand the ask properly. I am assuming that you want to choose off days other than the weekends. Am I correct?

@sriram pasupathi yes - we want the ability to skip weekends and specified dates. The idea is that the email would remain in the queue until the next day that is not “blacked out” and would send at a later time. 

This would also help with internal emails. We have notifications send to teams not in GS so they are aware of things on going with the CSM. It would be helpful to ensure these do not get sent over the weekend so that they do not get buried in other emails

@sriram pasupathi and @sai_ram I didn’t see this one when I made my post, but I have a similar but broader request here too: 

• Request: Holiday Support for Data and Rule Filters New Idea
• 19 Votes

Thanks for the feedback. We will evaluate this from our side from rules engine perspective. @rakesh 

Bringing this back up for consideration -- could something like this be built (possibly one in Cockpit and another in the Digital Journey menu) that would give admins the ability to adjust a blackout schedule for individually selected programs, using a multi-select option?

We have a number of JO programs and CTAs that could trigger during client holidays (or our own), and having a single place to go for each of those that we could update the blackout dates for the individual programs (rather than pausing each individual program) would make things significantly easier.

At the very least, we need to have the ability to skip weekend delivery as an easy toggle (not something where we have to build in logic tied to a calculated “Day of the Week” field with a delay step based on the current day.

Considering the upcoming Christmas holiday, it would be fantastic if there was a something that tied into our CSMs OoO schedule and adjusted the send schedule for any emails that might be sent on their behalf (or routed them to a pooled CSM model as necessary), and similarly for their CTAs.

Can we get any update on this, since the last comment was two years ago?

I find myself constantly bringing this sort of thing up whenever date ranges and due dates are mentioned. “What about Christmas? What about Thanksgiving?” etc. It sounds like a niche, but it’s pretty widespread in my experience and extending this kind of grace period / blackout dates functionality to relevant areas would help with planning and prevent holiday-related blowups.

Adding my +1 here as the idea in principle is sound - providing the functionality to skip weekends or holidays for CTAs/Rules/JOs.  A couple of considerations I had were:

1) this will be considerably complex across account regions/CSMs. Segment 1 for US would need one set of exclusion dates, Segment 2 for UK another, Segment 3 for mainland Europe another, etc etc, and I wonder how we would in practice keep these dates separate and also these would require to be maintained.  Additionally, this is just for the accounts, a separate set of logic would then be required for the CSM being OOO.  And if CSMs have accounts across multiple regions, you can see already the layers of complexity such a solution will require to work effectively and reliably.

2) to consider how the send/trigger logic would work.  I’ll preface this by saying i’m not 100% on how the current skip logic works, so apologies if this is how it works right now! Let’s say a rule or JO skipped send/trigger because of an exclusion date, depending on how the logic was written, that particular account or participant may not meet the trigger criteria again.  We’d want the action to happen on the next working day, rather than just skip over it if it lands on an exclusion date.

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So the skip logic is an evaluate stage / conditional wait, and it will reevaluate the condition until it becomes true for the duration you set on that evaluate stage / conditional wait (every 11 hours for X days). After that duration, if it still doesn’t meet all conditions to proceed to the next email or step, it will consider it to be false and send participants down the false branch, which could be whatever you configured for that. 

So, when we build this today for weekends, it checks if DAY of WEEK =/= SAT or SUN (usually in a custom object or on company object), this way when it is or becomes true, it sends the email. If you have a max period for vacation of like 2 weeks in a row, you would make sure your evaluate stage re-evaluates the condition for that duration + 1 day for safety. 

The trick is to make sure that you engineer it so the condition becoming true sends them down the “main branch” (in advanced JO - in Dynamic JO, there’s of course a lot more flexibility in the way this could end up being configured so it’s wise to be careful with the branching as it’s more complex). 

Hope this clarifies how the skip logic can be built in JO today.

Thanks

A.

Maybe I am over simplifying this.

But, couldn’t you simply create a Calendar object and simply add an additional column that is filled with Actual Send date.

So now all you need to do it fetch the record where actual date = today and then see if Send Date is also today. If not filter them out.

I.E. if today is Saturday(1/13/24) and send date in Monday(1/15/24) that condition is false so it it filtered out.

Sunday(1/14/24) comes, send date is Monday(1/15/24) and still does not match today.

Monday(1/15/24) rolls around and Send date(1/15/24) does = today so it makes it through.

This works beautifully with holidays also as you can map your own company holidays to skip those days.