SLA based on internal notes
PlannedThe ability to have internal notes to fire SLA policies. This would allow SLAs to fire after a light agent has responded to a ticket.
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Official comment
Thanks for your continued interest in this capability! I want to provide an update on our progress here after my last update a few months ago. We plan to deliver the ability to customize what activates and fulfills SLA metrics. This will plug common gaps right now where reply time metrics don't get applied to a ticket, as well as the ability to fulfill an SLA metric with an internal note, instead of a public reply.
This is still something we plan to work on but it's been delayed and unfortunately won't be released this year. We now expect to release this during the first half of next year. There may be an EAP in Q1, so if that is the case I will post here about it.
I'm disappointed we didn't get this done in Q4, but I do want to highlight an alternative which may be a suitable stop gap in some situations.
Earlier this year we launched Group SLAs (available to Enterprise plans). The Group Ownership Time target only takes account of two things for measurement. The group assignment and the ticket status. It's not looking at comments at all, whether private or public. More about Group SLAs here. We also just announced an enhancement to Group SLAs meaning you can now specify more conditions in the policy definition, giving you a lot more flexibility on when to apply a Group SLA. Read the announcement.
We also made some other enhancements to SLAs this year, launching a new SLA metric, Total Resolution Time and also bringing reply-time SLAs to Messaging.
We have other enhancements planned for 2024, and I'll continue to keep you posted. Thanks again for the feedback, it's truly appreciated.
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I first thought this was bug.. well I hope it is a bug that gets addressed because this is absolute show stopper for larger companies with a lot of full service clients...
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+1 This is a feature that we desperately need.
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I reached out to Zendesk support and they confirmed there is no way to set a SLA target for tickets returned/reopened by light agent through internal comment. So the new SLA feature is a no-go for most of us with light agent managing communication of full service clients. Unfortunate, since the new SLA looked promising..
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This is also very important to our workflows. The use case is as follows:
- End user sends email to our Zendesk. First Reply Time SLA goal is set.
- Zendesk Agent replies to End User. First Reply Time SLA goal is met and removed.
- Zendesk Agent realizes ticket requires collaboration from a separate team. Zendesk Agent reassigns the ticket to the corresponding Group.
- Ticket appears in View of Unassigned Tickets in the destination Group, but with no SLA goal set.
When tickets are sorted by Next SLA Breach, this creates an opportunity for those tickets to age out in the back page of the View. In the absence of SLA policies that can apply to internal comments, another helpful approach might be to elevate these tickets with no SLA goal to the front of the View, instead of the back, so Agents don't lose visibility.
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I need this as well.
I think it is weird that no SLA metric can be triggered be an internal note. We try to work 100% SLA based, and this makes it a bit complicated because some tickets just get forgotten. This is both related to tickets submitted by agents and tickets with only internal comments e.g. a phone call, which has obviously had public activity (via the call it self).
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Hi, we need this as well. I hope it is implemented in 2019.
Thanks!
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This feature is very important to us as well, and the lack of SLA on internal notes has caused a lot of frustration. I really hope it gets put on the product roadmap soon.
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We really do need this feature. In our user case we serve an internal team of agents with operational queries. Tickets comments in the user case are typically internal. We work SLA based as a company and this causes a lot of frustration. We still need to serve these customers in an SLA based workflow, regardless of whether they are internal or external.
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+1 for this. We would also like to be able to utilize SLA on internal actions.
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I would definitely be up for this 100%!
Our team has a smaller group of full agents supported by a large group of light agents. I would like to be able to report on whether or not light agents are getting responses back to the team in a timely fashion, and this could be done with SLAs for them.
I'd ideally like to separate the SLA to not include full agents because they're being measured on the existing ones now. To have the option would be great.
I would then like to drill down to the specific agent for performance purposes for the individual.
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This is pretty critical for us. We get a lot of comments/questions/updates from internal teams on tickets that get missed for long periods of time because there is no SLA.
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Hi all -
Thanks as always for your feedback. I spoke with the product manager for this area of Support this morning, and work is being done on internal SLAs this year.
We can't share specifics on exactly which use-cases will be targeted yet, but I did flag this one for consideration. -
Great to hear this is being looked at!
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+! agreeing this feature would be great
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+1 for our team as well! We would love the ability to reset the SLA for some of our longer development items. Rather than creating ridiculously long SLA metrics, having the SLA reset on an internal note would be incredibly useful for us.
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Hi, its been 3 years since this topic has been posted. Has there been any changes?
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That's what I think with almost every suggestion (picked up by Zendesk Product Dev) :(
@... what's the status? It's 2020 ;)
Kind regards,
Oliver -
YES PLEASE!!!
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Providing tools to help managing SLAs for tickets from internal users would be a HUGE help for the enterprise user. We have a number of teams that use Zendesk and we're constantly submitting tickets to each other. The current SLA functionality is next to useless for this use case. We need to be able to have a first reply time and next reply time for both light agents and full agents. Maybe Zendesk could ignore agent status if the agent is the ticket requester?
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I agree!
This is slowing down my team because they need to check their home screen in Zendesk regularly in order to make sure that they dont miss older tickets. I set up the SLA in order to have them work on their view of unsolved tickets so they always know which ticket to do next and the fact that there is no way to make private notes coming in as answers from customers part of the SLA breach is a big flaw in my work flow. I hope this gets a solution soon.
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A lot of our requesters are Light Agents. While the First Reply time fires, the next reply time does not.
This seems only half implemented and is of crucial importance to us.
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As an FYI - the Zendesk Support EAP - Child ticket side conversations can be helpful for some use cases related to requests from internal users and SLAs. We've started testing this EAP which allows agents to open tickets using the side conversation feature. One of the benefits of this is that the requesting agent on the child ticket is treated as an end-user in terms of the SLA. This allows us to track all SLAs for our internal users when they create these child tickets.
The EAP still doesn't address the issue where an internal user comments directly on a ticket or directly submits a request and the SLAs are not honored the same as for end-users. However, it's a step up from previous functionality.
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Is there an update from the product manager on if Internal Note SLA's will be rolled out anytime soon?
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Hi Everyone!
Thanks for all our comments and input. I'm a new Product Manager here at Zendesk, and one of our priorities for the year is to improve functionality in this regard. I know this is what we told you a year ago, but unfortunately those plans were dropped when we reprioritized everything due to COVID and WFH.
Thanks for your patience, and continued feedback! We truly appreciate it.
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@... That's awesome to hear, are you willing to share some more details on what you are planning?
Our use case would be related to ticket sharing between instances. For example, an Italian customer contacts our Italian colleagues. They cannot answer his question completely and share the Tickt with the HQ instance. The HQ agent answer to the Italian agent via internal comment (not directly meant for the customer). Can we create an SLA for the internal comments coming from the HQ agents? -
Our teams could also really use this functionality. While there are custom workarounds that may help with this, we really need a supported method from Zendesk.
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Hi @scott - Happy to know that this is being prioritized. Hope to see this feature soon.
The use cases for us here is -
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The end-user sends an original query to a light agent outside of ZD. The light agent then forwards it to ZD, where the agent will work on it and communicate back the answer to the light agent as an internal note and close the ticket.
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The public comment from an end-user creates the ticket. ZD agent will have a communication with the light agent through the internal note. In this scenario, the ZD agent will not go back to the end-user with a public reply, but that is being taken care of by the light agent outside the ZD.
Currently, the FRT is not calculated/captured in either case. We have 1500+ such scenarios for the period Jan - April 2021. Having this feature will be highly appreciated as we are missing those valuable stats as of today.
Thanks
Rishi
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@... are there any new updates to this?
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Thank you everyone for your patience, I can share an update. The good news is we have kicked off engineering on a foundational project that will support many future enhancements to our SLA capabilities. Once we complete this first phase we'll start work on adding new features, expected sometime in Q4.
In the meantime, we have new documentation on how you can measure internal workflows using child tickets and SLAs. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404111727514-Defining-OLA-policies-using-internal-SLAs-and-child-ticket-side-conversations
While this does require a child ticket for each step, we do also plan to support reassignment workflows too. This is where a ticket is reassigned to one or more groups and each step has its own internal SLA, as well as the overarching customer-facing SLA. This is something we'll be working on too and I'll share progress when I can.
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