The OOO Auto-Reply Your Agent Did Not Read
· 8 min read
Your support agent pages a human at 2 a.m. The human has been out for a week. The OOO message lives in the same inbox the agent is reading. The agent pings the human anyway. The auto-reply lands. The agent thanks it politely and pings again, because the reply did not contain the resolution code it was waiting on. Twelve cycles in, somebody on a different team notices the unread thread is now sixty messages deep and goes manually wake up the on-call.
The agent did exactly what the prompt told it to do. The prompt told it to escalate to a person. The person was a string, not a role. The string did not know about PTO.
