| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| April 7, 2022 | April 18, 2022 | April 25, 2022 |
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) allow you to set targets for reply and solve times on tickets. When looking at a ticket or a view, a badge is shown in either green or red to indicate whether time remains on the SLA or not.
What’s changing and why?
To make it easier to identify SLAs that are about to breach, we’re introducing a new color for the SLA timer badge. When there are 15 minutes or less remaining, the badge will now change from green to amber. After 15 minutes have expired, the badge will change to red, as usual.
We have also updated the three badge colors to adhere to accessibility best practices, meaning their color values have changed slightly.
Is there anything I need to do?
No action is required. This change will roll out to all Zendesk users starting on April 18, 2022.
This change will be visible when using Zendesk on the web, but will not be available yet from the Zendesk mobile apps for iOS and Android.
For more information, see Viewing and understanding SLA targets.
18 Comments
Cool update!
Scott Allison Will we have the option to customise the amber badge's time threshold, instead of 15 minutes? If so, would it be customisable per SLA Policy?
Rafael Santos Not in this initial release but configuration is something we're thinking about as an enhancement. Can you explain more about how you'd use this?
Looks great!
And Scott Allison, we'd also love to customize the thresholds for each color. The main reason being is that we have many different departments with different tolerances on SLA breaches.
Stoked to see Zendesk improving SLAs.
We have 10 minute SLA timers on our SMS messages. This upgrade is not going to help with those.
Scott Allison, We'd use it to define what would be in risk of breach, though that can vary per SLA Policy, as there are different SLA Targets' times for different teams and lines of business.
Team A could have targets of 30-60 minutes, benefitting from a 15 minute amber threshold, while Team B could instead have targets of 12 hours, where a 1-2 hour amber threshold would make more sense for them.
This is looking neat! Additionally, the same SLA policy could have different thresholds, depending on the metric. For example, the threshold for my FRT could be 15 minutes, but 5 minutes for NRT.
Also, you know how graphic design tools allow us to resize elements in pixels or percentage? Another nice little feature could be something similar: the ability to set a threshold percentage per policy (perhaps respecting a minimum of 1 min), so that we wouldn't have to manually input thresholds per metric, per SLA policy.
Scott Allison My teams would also like to customize the SLA window. We provide engineering support: many questions asked need an hour to debug, test, and provide an informative reply. Fifteen minutes is arbitrary and too late to provide a meaningful update. We discourage our staff from acknowledging a ticket to prevent an SLA breach, because it games our stats and masks the need for hiring to provide adequate coverage.
I can appreciate how this might be difficult for your team to build based on your different customer use cases. Thank you for approaching future updates with this kind of curiosity.
I was excited at the announcement at first...until I saw its not customisable 😔 its a good starter but we really need it customisable
I agree with Christopher Kenrick!
As admins, we know our Zendesk usage best and a way to configure red/yellow/green brackets would be best! Every instance is so different.
If you intend to go down the route of adding customised SLA ranges, can you also tag on the ability to notify when an SLA hits the amber metric please? We'd like to be able to notify Slack/Other tooling when an SLA is within 30mins of breaching, which isn't possible with the current tooling.
Anthony Stenhouse Thank you for that feedback! I'm the Product Manager for SLAs and we're right now on a big investment into this feature set with a number of enhancements. Real time alerting for SLAs is on the medium long-term roadmap. In the meantime partners like Sweethawk can provide these alerts for a small additional cost.
Scott Allison some feedback from our team:
People are having a hard time reading the badges for SLA. Even those who are not color blind are disappointed by this.
The ability to customize badge colors is an enhancement we are interested in. Should we submit a formal enhancement request to include with the other requests, or is visibility here appropriate enough? Whichever works best for you and your tracking, we can accommodate.
Thanks!
Matt Natali Thanks for asking the question! Yes, please do open a new thread here. Thank you.
Great to see progress Scott Allison and I would love to be able to measure not by time remaining but by % remaining too. I know it's greedy but 3 levels of % would be even better! And if they can be configured per metric that would be awesome!
The idea of using a configurable % remaining would allow consistency based on the target time. For example, if my 1st response SLA target times vary greatly from 5 minutes to 24 hours, the 15 minute setting we have now isn't going to work well because it's too high for a 5 min SLA target and too low for anything more than maybe 5 hours.
If instead I had a warning state at 20%, I would be notified with 1 minute remaining for the 5 minute response SLA and with 4.8 hours for the 24 hour SLA.
Maybe for resolution times (between 2 hours to 5 day) I would 25%, so would be warned with 30 mins left and 1.25 days left. This gives me time to act relative to the target times.
Ideally I would like at least three %s defined, eg 75% remaining, 50% remaining, 25% remaining and defined based on metric.
Then we need a way to proactively inform based on that %, (eg 75% to assignee, 50% assignee and Support manager, 25%, assignee, Support manager and Customer Account Manager). We don't have a team able to sit and monitor each ticket to see when one hits SLA, but we'd like to get notified based on the % remaining,
I know it's a lot Scott, and the start made already is progress, but SLAs are such a key part of Support and vary so much between customers/users.
Eg:
Want to add that we are currently using sweethawk SLAs as a solution so that an email notification can be set up for a 30 minute SLA. Still would love this functionality within Zendesk itself.
How can I notify people for Sla breach separately for first reply time and resoltion time ? Under automation i cannot find different event which is major issue.also in view i am not able to focuson tickets based on sla due and overdue
Based on Automation conditions and actions reference, there are only two condition for SLA. Therefore, you cannot specify an automation for a specific SLA target. How to alert your team to tickets nearing an SLA breach, provided a good reference for such automation. But this will be fired for all SLA targets.
As many others, I would also like to see the possibility to customize the timing of the badge colors.
We have very different SLA policies across the teams
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