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Functionality to pause an SLA

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2017년 12월 12일에 게시됨

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

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

2023년 12월 22일

Thank you everyone for continuing to share your needs for this. Unfortunately we didn't get to this in the timeframe I previously shared. This year we launched Group SLAs, Total Resolution Time, and reply time SLAs are now supported in Messaging conversations.

But we still want to deliver the ability for you to customize exactly how SLA targets get measured, including how an SLA timer is activated and fulfilled. This will give you more control and the ability to capture things like first reply time on agent created tickets, or pause next reply time while a ticket is on hold. These enhancements are planned for the first half of 2024. Later next year we'll offer realtime alerts, notifications and reminders for SLAs.

Thanks again for your feedback, we truly appreciate it.

Lara McCaleb

2025년 6월 06일

I've been searching the ZenDesk community for a resolution to be able to pause our next reply time SLA when no response is needed to the customer while we are actively researching something internally. It's a common scenario for to update a customer with next steps and expected turnaround time to research more complex issues and they reply with ‘Thank you’ which triggers the next reply time SLA. It makes sense to move these tickets into an ‘On Hold’ status and pause the next reply time SLA. There is no way to pause this, making it very challenging to hold agents accountable to the metric when they work a mix of complex and straightforward cases.

ZenDesk briefly rolled out customization to SLA's where an internal note could satisfy next reply time if configured, but those were rolled back with no updates as to when they'll be introduced.

Has anyone figured out a good workaround for this gap in functionality?

Emeryrose

2025년 5월 15일

We just want to pause the SLA if we add the tag or other operation.

D.Fitz

2025년 1월 14일

It's been 8 years since the initial request to exclude On Hold tickets from the Next Reply Time SLA and, if i understand correctly, no progress has been made at all.

Is there any plan to make the desired update?

Paul Biagio

2024년 7월 23일

This latest update doesn't seem to address our requirements at all which is very disappointing considering we were under the impression this feature was actively being worked on. We need to start the next reply SLA when the status goes from Pending to Open and we need to pause if it ever goes into On Hold status. I know for a fact some of your competitors have offered this functionality for years so it's sad to see it still missing from Zendesk.

Scott Allison

2024년 7월 22일

I wanted to provide you all with an update on our SLA capabilities and point you to a release that we started rolling out today. While it doesn't address pausing of SLA targets, it give admins a lot more control now over what activates or fulfills an SLA, on an individual policy basis.

These enhancements effect three of the SLA metric types, first reply time, next reply time and periodic update. These new settings are optional, and give you the ability to change the logic for when an SLA metric is activated or fulfilled, on an individual policy basis.

Read more in the announcement here:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7411959450778-Announcing-advanced-SLA-configuration-settings

Our next major piece of work on SLAs is going to be for providing near real-time notifications and actions, but for now we have no specific timeline for “pausing SLAs”. If this is still something you need, please fill out this form so we can understand more about your needs.

-5

Scott Allison

2024년 3월 09일

Thank you to everyone that's commented or upvoted this request. We're soon going to be working on this and would like to hear in more depth from customers who would like this functionality. If you're willing to provide more info to us, or get on a call to discuss, please fill out this form. Thank you!

Miki Kanomata

2024년 2월 28일

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.

+1 to this comment! We had to exclude the tag in the SLA settings to remove the SLA policy for specific on-hold status. It will be nice to have the easier UI design to customize for on-hold status tickets to pause SLAs.