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SLA Alerting in Minutes
Planned
Posted Sep 01, 2015
Currently, the smallest breach you can set up to be alerted is coming up, is an hour. Everyone I've talked to who uses Zendesk deeply and desperately needs this to be a much much more granular time set. Many of us have critical priorities of MUCH less than an hour. This renders SLA breach alerts completely useless on the most critical of our tickets.
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92 comments
Rachel Kelly
We need alerts for upcoming SLA breaches in production on a constant basis. As our volume increases this will only become even MORE critical.
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Joel Hellman
I agree there are many scenarios where hourly automations on SLA metrics are not enough. If you run a tight SLA (under a couple of hours), at least 10 minutes granularity is needed. Right now on our twitter channel, we have two hours, and the hourly automations doesn't help us.
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Simon
I agree - we have a first response target of 2 hours for most tickets, but 15 minutes on urgent ones; if all agents are active within other tickets, these can be overlooked when the automations only account for an hour intervals.
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Robert Jerina
This is very much needed. Hourly automations is just horrible.
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Erin Boyle
Hi all,
I'm working with a company called ALTAIR SIX that's interested in extending Zendesk's SLA functionality. I think it might be especially relevant to all of you on this post.
If you're interested, we'd love to ask you a few questions to further understand your use cases. You can do that (and opt in or out of chatting with us further) by filling out this form: https://goo.gl/b7qYmD
Best,
Erin
(Note: Just to remove any potential confusion, I am not currently affiliated with Zendesk)
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Michal Novak
We also have the need to track SLA's in minutes for our mission critical clients. Hours are not working for us. This may be one of the main reasons for us moving from Zendesk to other solution.
Cheers,
Michal
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Winston Price
Upvoted.
This is what I consider to be the Achilles Heel of Zendesk, as my organization is contractually obligated to reply back to customers in specific timeframes for specific priorities. If these can't be set properly, they are completely useless to us. This is actually a black and white scenario.
I consider this to be a major design flaw for SLAs and will have to ignore them until this is fixed. The option to either set by hours or minutes, or to accept non whole integers (0.25 for 15 minutes, for example) are both acceptable solutions for this issue. As Mr. Novak mentions above, this would be a reason for us to start looking for other help desk providers.
Regards,
Winston Price
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Ellen James
I can't stress how much we need this functionality. Having recently implemented Zendesk, this is the only area that we feel is lacking and doesn't meet our needs. SLA management was a really big reason for selecting Zendesk over other products and to find that the functionality is hampered by hourly automation process is a massive let down - to say the least.
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Giovanni Berthelot
+1 here. It's a very important feature for all the product with Premium users and clients.
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Craig
+1! We need the ability to setup an SLA notification 15 mins prior to it being breached to ensure that our customers are getting the best possible service...I take it this is not currently available??
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Erik Rutten
+1 We also have SLAs with targets set anywhere from 30-60 minutes. We'd need to notify key people if SLA is 15 min from breach. Do you have any updates for when we can expect to see this functionality?
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HiRoad
Ditto, this needs to be in parity and available in minute increments vs. hours. We deal with Chats and SMS where timing is much tighter than an hour.
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Kristen Malecki
+1! Our team needs to adhere to a 15 min response time, so having this feature would be very useful.
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Elizabeth Toy
It seems a simple solution would be to allow fractions of numbers in the field for Hours since/until next SLA breach, as opposed to whole numbers. Then .25 would be 15 minutes, 1.5 would be 90 minutes, etc.
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Eric Madura
Not only does this need to have a minute function, the automation needs to fire when the SLA violation happens - not waiting for an "hourly cron" to fire off.
Your design of this appears to be misguided - why have an SLA if you end up having to wait 60 minutes between cycles? Why have SLA's to begin with?
This needs to be fixed immediately - this thread has been open for 2.5 years - get with it Zendesk and listen to your customers!
We're actively exploring other ticketing systems because of this - nothing personal....
4
Mark Sadegursky
Doesn't make any sense that you have SLA in minutes, but you can't use it in triggers. Triggers should be configurable to handle minutes, SLA violations.
Extremely disappointing that after 2.5 years that nothing moves at Zendesk.
I'm in the same boat as Eric, looking at alternative solutions. I think Zendesk has lost their way and gotten too big.
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Nicole Saunders
Hey Mark -
Longevity of a request isn't one of the metrics we use to determine priority for development. Also our roadmaps are often planned about a year in advance, so it can take several years for a request to gain traction, be weighted against other priorities and then get into the production queue.
The number of customers it impacts, where it fits in a workflow, market trends, and how it fits with other things currently in development are a few of the other things we do consider.
None of that is to discount the importance of what folks are asking for here - it's definitely a valid and important request. I checked in with the product team, and the answer is simply that there are hundreds more requests for things to be built than can be built, and this particular request hasn't been deemed higher priority than other things at this point in time.
That being said, there are a couple of things you can do:
- Create a view that shows any tickets that are approaching a breach in a timeframe you determine. It's not a notification, but it can help to give more visibility to tickets that are on the verge of going over the SLA time.
- Leverage apps and the API to send an SMS when you are nearing a breach, as described in this comment on the tech note Can I be notified of an SLA breach
I know that's not the answer that you were looking for, but I hope those solutions will help.
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Peter Godden
Hi all, we've built an app that solves this use-case. It's called Timers and is available on the Zendesk marketplace. It lets you define down-to-the-minute actions on tickets. Amongst many other workflow possibilities it will let you build workflow to help stop short SLA's from being breached.
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Dirk Popelka
This is one of the Risks in our Go Live and none of the apps like Timers pass our security review, so we need some in-app functionality.
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Igal Dar
I agree 100% with Dirk. W have strict policies and as much as a non-Zendesk app can solve our issue we cannot get approval to use it.
It doesn't make sense that the ticket holds that data, easily accessible by an API call and we can get nd read policy_metrics but Zendesk Support automation does not provide the granularity needed to manage SLA notifications efficiently.
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VK
I'd also love to have minute increments. As Mark Sadegursky said it makes no sense to give us the option to have SLA's in minutes but not add triggers for them.
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Jo Herbert
We really really need this!
We have customer that has a SLA level but they require a response of 1hour
If I use hours then we are already breaching the SLA.
Please can you get minutes implemented!
Thanks
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Russell Dunn
@...
Zendesk lacks so much basic functionality in so many areas, this is just one of the myriad reasons I'm now actively telling my company to leave Zendesk.
1
The Original DKNY
Hourly SLA's does not cut these days, Customers are used to instant responses. We as admins need to be able to give our Agents better signals of what needs to be addressed next. In order to have a better signal to noise ratios, 5-minute intervals in needed. Automations need to run every 15-30 minutes, not maybe every 60-65.
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Josh Ramdhan
Just wanted to echo what everyone is saying here. We are contractually obligated to respond to high/urgent priority tickets within 60 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively. Having an email sent to a group/assignee at the one hour mark means we've not only upset the client, but LOST REVENUE in the order of high 4-figures. @... please consider this addition into Zendesk. Zendesk is a large expense item for us and not having this ability means we need to seek other products to supplement, costing us more each month -- unnecessarily, I might add.
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Mark H
I'd like to add to this, no different from above really
We have several SLAs for initial Ticket Response which are measured in minutes, from 15 minutes upwards. The current Hour whole based Conditions don't offer what we need.
Can we have "Minutes until next SLA Breach" or allow decimal for hours, 0.1 = 6 minutes would be ok too.
Is this issue caused by data; Integer vs decimal OR by the process that Polls the Automations?
thanks, Mark
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Igal Dar
Just a quick note to probably set expectations from what I came to know the product - Zendesk has a built in refresher, a task that runs in the background and indexes everything, checks for triggers and fires off events, which runs once an hour. We don't know when exactly, as dev ops may fine tune timing to make sure there are no collisions on pods. This explains hourly triggers (roughly an hour, we don't how much time a task takes), in Zendesk Support as well as Explore.
In order to have a granular per-minute trigger, there needs to be a task that runs every minute and scans the triggers DB table vs the data. It cannot be the refresher (or whatever its true name is), as that is a huge one. So the request is to build a new engine that runs every minute and performs a subset of that task.
We, as customers, do not know how taxing this is on pods and what is the toll on performance, for a per-minute task.
Please don't get me wrong, this is a great product, and it's top-tier. I do think that engineering needs to be creative in finding a solution for this. Maybe spin up shadow pods that their whole purpose is perform tasks (split it from the UI). The bottom line is that other products have this feature, and this is what customers expect to get. Especially when dealing with SLA, which can have financial impact, as the gentleman posting above noted.
Thanks.
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Michael Assis
Hello,
This is another request to add the ability for SLA breach to automatically do something straight away.
Like many others, the company I work for relies on having an alert sent to PagerDuty if a SLA is breached. Having tested the system and having tried multiple ways to try to get this functionality with what Zendesk offers, I have finally reached the point where I now need to look at moving to another product.
Now I understand that it's extremely taxing on a system to poll triggers every minute, for 1000s of instances of Zendesk, but surely it's easier enough that on SLA breach, the system can do "something". You're already tracking the time of an SLA and you already know when it's about to breach.
Honestly, it doesn't seem to me like Zendesk has really thought out this process at all. What's the point of having an SLA in the first place if you then wait an hour before anything happens?
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Serena Bond
Adding a comment to bump this. I'm even trying to get creative with automations to get a trigger to go off when a ticket breaches and I'm hitting the "automation can only go off once on a ticket" error.
Please explain how "Ticket: Hours Since Created / (calendar) Less Than / 1 hour" can hit more than once on a ticket....? A ticket can only increase the hours since it's creation. It can never be created for less than an hour more than once if Zendesk automations only check once an hour already.
If we cannot set any triggers up based on SLA or Queue, there HAS to be a way to identify tickets where the SLA has breached and send out a notification to the team. Maybe create a "ticket_breached" tag as a Zendesk Feature? or create a way to send out notifications based on when a ticket enters a specific queue?
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Scott Allison
Hi Everyone!
Thanks for all your comments and input on this thread. I'm a new Product Manager here at Zendesk, and one of our priorities for the year is to improve our SLA functionality. Thanks for your patience, and continued feedback! We truly appreciate it.
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