SLA policies

An SLA policy sets how quickly your team should first respond to a ticket and how quickly it should be solved. opendesk picks a policy for every new ticket, shows the time left on the ticket and in the list, and tells the assignee when a target is missed. Policies can be limited to a priority, to a team, or both, and can count only your business hours.

1. New policy: create a policy. Managing SLA policies needs the admin role.
2. Order: policies are checked from top to bottom. Drag a row to move it.
3. Priority: the policy applies only to tickets of this priority. All priorities applies to any.
4. Team: the policy applies only to this team’s tickets. A lock means the team is private.
5. Business hours: the clock runs only while you are open. Without it, every minute counts.
6. Enabled: switch a policy off to stop it applying to new tickets, without deleting it.

Create a policy

1. Open Settings, then SLA policies

   SLA policies is in the Inbox group of the settings menu. Click New policy.

2. Name it and choose what it applies to

   Pick a priority under Applies to, or leave Any priority. Pick a Team to limit it to that team’s tickets, or leave Any team.

   

3. Set the two targets

   First response within is how long until the first agent reply. Resolve within is how long until the ticket is solved. Enter a number and choose Minutes, Hours or Days; the line under each shows the total.

4. Decide whether nights and weekends count

   Turn on Count business hours only to pause the clock outside your hours and on holidays. Then click Create policy, and drag it to the right place in the list.

Put the specific policies first

The first enabled policy that fits a ticket wins, so order them from most specific to most general: urgent, then a team’s own policies, then a catch-all such as Standard with any priority and any team at the bottom. A ticket that matches no policy has no SLA.

Which policy a ticket gets

opendesk goes down the list and takes the first enabled policy whose priority is the ticket’s priority (or any) and whose team is the ticket’s team (or any). It sets two due times from when the ticket was created:

• First response due is met by the first agent reply.
• Resolution due is met when the ticket is solved.

The policy is picked again when the ticket’s priority or team changes, and the due times are worked out again from the ticket’s creation. Disabling or editing a policy does not change the due times of tickets it was already applied to until one of those changes.

Business hours

A policy that counts business hours uses the hours of the ticket’s team when the team has its own, else the workspace’s. Set the workspace hours in Settings, Business hours.

1. Use business hours and the Time zone the hours are in.
2. Weekly hours: switch each day on or off and set up to three ranges a day, on the quarter hour.
3. Holidays: dates when you are closed all day, up to 100.

A team that works other hours, like a support team in another time zone, can have its own. Open the team in Settings, Teams, and under Hours choose Own schedule instead of Workspace hours.

A team’s hours are used for its SLA timers, for whether the chat widget shows as open, and for Ollie’s answers outside hours.

An example

Hours are 9:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday. A ticket arrives at 16:00 on a Friday under a policy with a 4 hour first response target that counts business hours only. One hour runs on Friday, the clock stops for the weekend, and the reply is due at 12:00 on Monday.

Watch what is due

1. Sort the list by SLA due

   Click the sort button at the top of the ticket list and choose SLA due. The tickets closest to missing a target come first.

   

2. Read the pills in the list

   A ticket shows a pill only when it needs attention: amber when a target is due within the hour, red with how long ago it passed, like 5d 4h over.

   

3. Open a ticket for the details

   The SLA section at the foot of the details panel names the policy and shows each target: the time left, how far over it is, Met or Missed.

   

When a target is missed

When a target passes unmet, the ticket is marked as breached:

• an activity is added to the timeline, such as “First response target was missed”;
• the assignee gets an SLA breached notification;
• the breach counts in reports, under SLA breached.

Automations can react to tickets as they change, for example raising the priority of a ticket in a queue that is falling behind.

Defaults and limits

• New workspaces start with a policy you can edit or delete.
• Targets are stored in minutes. Days are 24 hours, or 24 open hours when the policy counts business hours.
• A policy for a private team appears with a lock. Its tickets are visible only to the team’s members, and so are their SLA pills.

Related

• Triage and assignment
• Teams and roles
• Automations
• SLA policies API