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How to alert your team to tickets nearing an SLA breach

Madison Davis
  • Edited
Zendesk Community Team

In How to use a view to surface and resolve high-volume ticket topics, we shared how to categorize tickets and create views to filter for those specific categories so you can power through a ticket spike. Then, How to use SLAs to prioritize tickets during high-volume periods showed how to add SLA targets and apply those policies to tickets you want to prioritize. Finally, this article will outline the final step: how to create automated notifications to your team to alert them to tickets that are nearing an SLA breach. 

Considerations

You'll want to begin by creating and applying SLA policies to tickets in your account. You can see a specific example of how to implement this in How to use SLAs to prioritize tickets during high-volume periods or general instructions for creating SLAs in Defining and using SLA policies (Professional and Enterprise).

Instructions

In this example, we'll be creating an automation to notify the team of a ticket that's nearing SLA breach using the SLA we created above, in How to use SLAs to prioritize tickets during high-volume periods.

  1. In Support, click Admin () > Automations
  2. Click Add automation
  3. Enter a title for your automation
  4. Under Meets all of the following conditions, select Ticket: hours until next SLA breach > Less than > 2
    • If you have business hours set in your account, you may want to choose (business) less than as opposed to (calendar) less than
    • You may also want to specify a custom ticket field, like an About field value, to narrow down when this automation will fire
    • The Ticket: Status is less than Solved condition is to make sure this Automation will save successfully. You can also use conditions for Type, Group, Assignee or Requester to satisfy this requirement. 
    • The Ticket Tag condition and action are used to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once. Learn more about these concepts in this article: About automations and how they work.
  5. Under Perform these actions, you may wish to notify an individual user, a group of users, or even an external target or integration. 
  6. Click Create automation.

Once you are managing prioritized tickets with SLAs and automations, you may want to visit the SLA dashboard in Zendesk Explore to monitor your adherence to SLAs over time. 

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10 Comments

  • Joe Maloney
    • Edited

    I ran into two issues when trying to set up this automation (with brand, but not an about field):

    • Automation must test for at least one of the following ticket properties in the ALL conditions section: Status, Type, Group, Assignee, Requester.
    • Automation must not run multiple times per ticket. It must have a time-based condition that is only true once (Hours since created is 24) or an action that nullified a condition ("Priority Is High" and an action setting it to "Priority Is Urgent").

    Possibly related to our particular setup, but wanted to flag in case others were getting the same error. Any advice? I can add in group easily, and was thinking about adding in a tag to hopefully correct the second error. 

    Thanks!

    Update: added in group and tag ("upcoming_sla_breach") and was able to submit the automation - but a ticket could breach an SLA multiple times depending on the metric/setup. Does anyone have advice on how to handle notifications for that?

    1
  • Elissa
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hi Joe Maloney

     

    Thank you for pointing this out! The example conditions in this article are definitely more of a skeleton and will definitely need to be fleshed out with your teams particular needs before it is ready to go.

    I'm glad you were able to use groups and tags to get those errors sorted out. Here are two resources that may be helpful to others encountering the same errors as they get their own automations up and running: 


    In regards to the conflict between the requirement of a nullifying condition and the reality that SLAs can breach on the same ticket multiple times, this is an excellent point! While no easy solution within the automation itself comes to mind right away, you definitely could use this work-around: 1) set up a nullifying condition using a tag (as you have already) and 2) create a trigger that removes that tag any time it is added.

    Other community members may have better suggestions as well!

    I hope that helps. Let us know if you have any further trouble!

    0
  • Joe Maloney
    • Edited

    The trigger to remove the tag is a great idea! I'll try that. Thanks Elissa!

    Update: trigger working well! Thanks again!

    0
  • Valerie Trenholm

    Hi Madison,

    I was certain that the automation only ran every hour so by the time we get an email notification the ticket may have already breached.

    This is why we've been using 2 hours to give us some wiggle room. 

    Can you shed some light on this?

    0
  • Ben Van Iten
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hi Valerie!

    The amount of hours you use in this case is up to you. I can certainly understand using two hours to give you more of a buffer. Like many workflows/features in Zendesk, one size definitely does not fit all.

    Let us know if I have not addressed the question properly and we'll be glad to help further!

    0
  • Ben Van Iten
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hi Joe Maloney and Valerie Trenholm,

    Thank you both for your feedback and suggestions. With that in mind, we have made the following updates to the article:

    • Added the additional conditions/actions in relation to the additional automation condition/nullifying condition that is needed for the Automation to save
    • Updated the hours to less than 2 as this use case might be more appealing to a wider customer base given how automations function
    • Updated the screenshot to reflect all of this

    Please let us know if you have any further thoughts or questions on this.

    0
  • Emelie Stjernquist

    Hello,

    I've a problem related to that we have one SLA metric (1st Reply time) that is more important than the other ones and the only one we would like to have an Alarm for via Automation. Unfortunately, SLA metric is not possible to use in Automations nor for Triggers. Does anyone know a workaround for this?

    Thanks!

    0
  • Brandon Tidd
    Community Moderator

    Hi Emelie Stjernquist,

     

    There are probably a couple of ways to tackle this - but the simplest workaround that comes to mind is using tags.  This would be a two step process.  First, you would trigger a tag based on the first public reply:

     

    Then, you would include a condition in your automation that looks for that tag as a way to negate it: 

    In this case, the automation would fire if it's one our until the next SLA breach AND the tag is missing.  Once the tag is added (on the agent's first reply), this automation would be negated and not run.  Hope this helps!

    Brandon

    1
  • Emelie Stjernquist

    Hi Brando,

    Thank you, that's smart. I will definitly try that.

     

    Thanks!

    1
  • Jiri Kanicky
    • Edited

    The fact that automation runs only one time every hour is a big flaw of Zendesk.

    Another flaw is that you have to create/removes tags to actually be able to create Automation (eg. for notifications). Adding or removing tags updates the ticket, which basically skews the reporting.

    I am really surprised that Zendesk team is not doing anything to removes these flaws and they keep advising people to create workarounds with Tags.

    Why don't they add a function to run it just one time, if they want to run it just one time?

    0

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