How to use SLAs to prioritize tickets during high-volume periods

During high-volume periods, you may be in search of a way to categorize, surface, and prioritize your tickets. In How to use a view to surface and resolve high-volume ticket topics, we started by categorizing tickets and creating views to filter for those specific categories. This article will outline the next step: how to use SLA policies to bring your highest-priority tickets to the top of a view. 

Considerations

The first step in preparing to add an SLA to this view is determine which tickets are considered highest priority for your business. Some examples might be:

• Tickets that have waited the longest for a first or next reply
• Tickets from specific organizations or users
• Tickets with a higher-indicated Priority 
  

Make note of any that stand out and begin by understanding what metrics you can measure with SLAs. For example, first and next reply time can help ensure you're responding to tickets that have been waiting longest for a response. We'll use this example to show a recipe for an SLA target. 

SLA Recipe

In this example, we will be using the ticket field (called About) and view we created in How to use a view to surface and resolve high-volume ticket topics. We will assign a 1 hour first reply time SLA to these tickets. 

Important: Begin by ensuring that you have a mechanism in place to assign Priority to incoming tickets. This could be done by trigger or automation, or could be manually set during a triage process. Priority is the ticket field that determines how SLAs fire, so it must be activated and the field must be set.

1. Click Admin () > Service Level Agreements.
2. Click Add policy.
3. Enter a name in the Policy Name field.
4. Optionally, enter a description in the Description field.
5. In the Conditions section, select the conditions for this policy. Start typing the condition to autocomplete or select an option from the drop-down menu.
   • This is where you might want to consider the tickets you defined as higher priority before, and for example, select specific organizations, users, or tickets to apply this SLA to. 
   • In our example, we'll be applying this SLA to tickets that have an About field value of Virus.
6. Next to First reply time, select the time frame you'd like to set as the SLA target. In this example, we're indicating 4 hours for all tickets with Urgent, High, or Normal priority:
7. Click Save.

Once the policy is saved, any newly created or updated tickets that match the conditions for this policy will have the SLA applied. You will be able to see the SLA policy from the ticket itself: 

Additionally, you can now show the SLA timer in the view you created in How to use a view to surface and resolve high-volume ticket topics. 

Add the SLA timer to a view

1. Click Admin () > Manage > Views and look for the view you created (or any view where you'd like to display the SLA timer). Next to the view's title, click the three dot icon and select Edit.
2. Scroll down to Table columns and select Next SLA breach as a column to include in the view.
3. Optionally, under Order by, change to Next SLA breach > Descending to surface tickets that are nearing breach to the top of the view. 
4. Click Save. When you return to the view, you should now see a timer showing the time until your SLA breaches: 

You can take additional actions on this SLA policy to help your team keep up with prioritized tickets. For more inspirations, see How to alert your team to tickets nearing an SLA breach.