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Functionality to pause an SLA

Not Planned


Posted Dec 12, 2017

Hi team,

Imagine that I have an SLA policy that requires first reply in 30 minutes and updates every 1 hour following that.

Very often, customers will write in with an urgent issue and request a screen sharing session right away. Our first reply is either to get quick initial info, or to simply send them our screen sharing link and ask them to get on the call with us.

These initial responses will satisfy our first reply SLA, but we run into problems when dealing with the 1 hour updates as we might be on the phone call with the customer for over an hour. This means that we are actively engaged with this customer providing them support, but zendesk is only tracking ticket updates, which an agent is not expected to submit while they are talking on the phone to the person who filed the ticket.

I understand that "Pausible update" is available, but this only allows me to pause an SLA when the ticket is pending. We use the Pending state as "we are waiting for the customer to respond", and being on a phone call with them working through an active troubleshooting session is not appropriate for the Pending state.

What I need is a way to pause an SLA while we are on the call that is not: setting it to Pending while on the phone, having it removed from our Open investigation queue, then setting back to Open and replying, then setting back to Pending, and so on.

Most of our SLA breaches are incorrect and are due to this type of reporting failure, and should not be considered real breaches.

I tried to work around this with a checkbox ticket field titled "Currently on a call" that an agent would check when they are on the phone with a customer and would apply an "on_a_call" tag to the ticket and our SLA policies exclude tickets that contain that tag, however this does not actually pause the SLA timer, it just deactivates the SLA and then reapplies the SLA from the previous reply time.

This means that if you are on a call with the checkbox checked for an hour and a half, then end the call and uncheck the box, the SLA will be reapplied and instantly breach as you are 30 mins past the last reply time.

Simply adding "on-hold" to be included in the pausible updates would be a solution, or something more involved where there is an actual option in a ticket to deliberately pause an SLA.

Thank you for your consideration.

Andrew Goetz


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63 comments

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

I wanted to provide you all with an update on our SLA capabilities and point you to a release that we started rolling out today. While it doesn't address pausing of SLA targets, it give admins a lot more control now over what activates or fulfills an SLA, on an individual policy basis.

 

These enhancements effect three of the SLA metric types, first reply time, next reply time and periodic update. These new settings are optional, and give you the ability to change the logic for when an SLA metric is activated or fulfilled, on an individual policy basis.

 

Read more in the announcement here:

 

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7411959450778-Announcing-advanced-SLA-configuration-settings

 

Our next major piece of work on SLAs is going to be for providing near real-time notifications and actions, but for now we have no specific timeline for “pausing SLAs”. If this is still something you need, please fill out this form so we can understand more about your needs.   

-5


This latest update doesn't seem to address our requirements at all which is very disappointing considering we were under the impression this feature was actively being worked on. We need to start the next reply SLA when the status goes from Pending to Open and we need to pause if it ever goes into On Hold status. I know for a fact some of your competitors have offered this functionality for years so it's sad to see it still missing from Zendesk.

5


It's been 8 years since the initial request to exclude On Hold tickets from the Next Reply Time SLA and, if i understand correctly, no progress has been made at all. 

Is there any plan to make the desired update? 

1


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