Using SLAs with different timezones, contracts and business hours
This year we implemented the SLAs feature to help manage the increasing ticket load, however this is complicated by differing timezones, contracts and business hours.
We only use the first reply time metric, but this is decided by a combination of:
- Contract (gold, silver, bronze, custom)
- Priority (urgent, high, normal, low)
- Timezone (if appropriate dependent on contract)
To achieve this, we needed to use a combination of:
SLAs
We use 4 of these - one for each contract - gold, silver, bronze, custom. We then utilize the "First time reply" target and the "Business hours" option, setting the appropriate values for urgent, high, normal and low.
Schedules
These were used to factor in different timezones. One for each different combination of contract and timezone, e.g. bronze (tz_gmt). Then the working hours (e.g. 0900-1700) were adjusted to match the contract and timezone.
Triggers
These were needed to apply the combination of SLA and Schedule onto every new ticket - one for each contract/timezone. We used the appropriate contract tag to set the relevant schedule.
Now our "Unassigned Queue" is managed by the "Next SLA breach" so we never miss an SLA regardless of Contract, Priority or Timezone.
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Great tip! Thanks, Mark.
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Hi Mark,
Thanks for sharing! Question for you: How do you differentiate, when a silver ticket comes in, which of the 2 schedules to apply? I know you use tags for that but what steps (I would assume a trigger) do you apply automatically to the new tickets (that fall into the silver category) coming in to assign the silver tag?
Hope my question was not very confusing!
Julian
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@Julian Lasser
Hi. In our case we have a frontend UI & backend which is synced with Zendesk; it uses REST to create the tickets in Zendesk. We store all our customer contracts in the backend (including their level of contract cover), so when it creates a ticket, it knows what level (e.g. silver) is required and so it adds the contract tag.
A more simple method, if you're only managing customers in Zendesk, would be to add the tag at the Organization level... and therefore every ticket raised under that Organization would receive that tag, which you could then use a trigger to pull in the Schedule/SLA.
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@Mark
Thanks again for your time.
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Thanks for taking the time to share this with everyone Mark :) This is fantastic!
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Thanks Mark for your wonderful tip. If you can help me with this..I am in the head office sending data to my other branches but one of my branches office didn't receive anything on the required time because they are in another region/place with a different time zone ..How do I solve this problem?.
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Hello @...,
I would have to take this into a ticket to see what is going on.
I will reach out to you in a ticket soon.
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