How to structure this SLA?

Hi Victoria Thrash -

While this use case goes beyond the original intent of SLA tracking I think, depending on some additional details and your Zendesk subscription level, that we may come up with a way for you to achieve your desired result.  One of the assumptions I'm making is that when an RMA is required, a new ticket is created that would trigger the countdown (vs updating an existing request).  If that's not the case, you may be able to do this by creating a child ticket through side conversations.

The second assumption is that there is a somewhat consistent deadline of creating a shipping order for same day with your shipping vendor of choice (let's call this 5PM CST). 

Using a second business schedule, you could create a schedule that says your "RMA Department" is open Monday - Thursday from 12N-5PM CST.  Then, if an RMA ticket is created, you setup a Trigger to assign this schedule to it.  * Note: Once you have a second schedule defined, you need to update your existing workflows to apply your normal business schedule to non-RMA tickets, as Zendesk will no longer do this by default.  Next, you'll need to create two triggers to test whether the ticket was created within business hours.  It is important to put these Triggers further down in your Trigger set.  Counterintuitively, if the ticket is created within business hours, you'll want to set the priority to normal, whereas outside of business hours will be classified as urgent (I'll explain why in a minute).  

Now that you have your RMA Schedule defined, you can setup a new RMA SLA Policy that sets the Requester Wait Time to 24 calendar hours for normal priority tickets and 5 business hours for urgent priority tickets (you'll of course need a condition here that makes these tickets unique, such as a form, field or tag that is specific to RMA requests to gate this SLA policy to just RMA tickets).  

So let's now consider two scenarios.  If this ticket is created at 3PM on Thursday, the department would have until 3PM on Friday (24 hours) to fulfill the request.  If, however, the request comes in at 3PM on Friday (or at any point between 5PM Thursday at Noon on Monday), the department would have until 5PM on Monday (5 business hours) to fulfill the request.  Finally, a ticket that comes in between 5PM Monday and Noon Tuesday would have until 5PM Tuesday (again, 5 business hours). 

Given that this is a fairly significant departure from the intended use case, I'd definitely recommend testing this extensively before deploying, but the more time I've spent with it, the more it feels like something that will get you pretty close to your desired SLA policy.  One last thing - don't forget to post your office holidays on the newly created schedule.  Hope this helps!

Brandon Tidd
729 Solutions

Thank you! I will dive into this soon and see if I can make it work. I did originally intend to use the original ticket that came in from the support desk, but we can create a subsequent ticket if it will make it work. Again, thanks for the input. I will let you know if it works!