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Functionality to pause an SLA
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
46
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