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Can I pause the SLA timer or reset it under certain conditions?

Ricardo Pinto
  • Edited
Zendesk Digital Resources Team

Question

Is it possible to pause the SLA clock or reset it under certain conditions?

Answer 

It's not possible to reset the clock of the SLA counter. If you set a schedule in your account and if you built the SLA policy to respect business hours, the SLA badge will consider the time outside of business hours and holidays. For more information, see this article: Why do I see differences in SLA target hours? 

If you are using any of the below SLA metrics, you may be able to pause the clock:

  • Requester wait time: the SLA pauses on pending.
  • Agent work time:  the SLA pauses on pending and on-hold.
  • Pausable update: the SLA pauses on pending.

If you are using any other metric, it is not possible to stop the SLA clock from running. 

Note: If you use the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can activate custom ticket statuses and create a new custom ticket status that corresponds to one of the ticket status categories (New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved) The SLA metrics will use the status category if custom ticket statuses are enabled.

As a workaround, you can create different policies with different targets that apply to tickets according to different conditions. For more information about SLAs, see the article: Defining and using SLA policies.

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6 Comments

  • Soukaina Najjari

    Hey, 

    I really need to pause the SLA on my On hold and Pending tickets, please assist with that. I can't find any great example for an SLA policy already done. 

    Here is the current SLA policy of my company 

    Please advise how to pause and what minutes to add in the Pausable update and agent work time. 

     

    0
  • Jacob the Moderator
    Community Moderator

    Hi Soukaina,

    You can pause your SLAs using a trick I like to call the David Walker maneuver. But I would recommend that you have either a fallback SLA to catch tickets in On-hold status or set up an automation to notify and/or change status back to open after some time has elapsed, so they don't get lost.

    Since status isn't one of the conditions you can apply for SLA policies, what you could do instead is have a tag "status_on_hold" as an ALL condition for your policy, and have triggers add and remove said tag as tickets move into and out of the on-hold status.

    For instance:

    1. Trigger 1: ALL Condition: Status Changed to On-hold. Action Add tags status_on_hold.



    2. Trigger 2: ALL Condition: Status Changed from On-hold. Action Remove tags status_on_hold.

     

    Hope that helps.

    3
  • Natalie_Lorente

    I've set this up, but I'm finding 2 or 3 responses later in the conversation that 'pausable update' is suddenly triggered again when the ticket was not put in pending in the last few back and forth between the rep and the customer.
    Any idea what could be triggering 'pausable update' in this case?

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    Hi Natalie,
     
    Pausable update will be triggered everytime your agent replies on a comment by the requester and set the ticket on New, Pending or On-Hold status. The pending status will only pause the active Pausable update. If in a new ticket, your agent added a comment and submitted it as Pending afterwards, Pausable Update will not apply.
     
    For more information please refer to Defining and Using SLA Policies.
    0
  • Raniery

    Jacob the Moderator thank you so much for your workaround. Work wonders!

    0
  • Jacob the Moderator
    Community Moderator

    Raniery, Thanks for letting me know it helped you, appreciated👍

    0

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