SLA Alerting in Minutes

We need alerts for upcoming SLA breaches in production on a constant basis.  As our volume increases this will only become even MORE critical.

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. 

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.

This is very much needed. Hourly automations is just horrible.

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)

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

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

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.

+1 here. It's a very important feature for all the product with Premium users and clients.

+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??

+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?

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.

+1! Our team needs to adhere to a 15 min response time, so having this feature would be very useful.

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.

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....

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/205435097/comments/360002209187 your efforts are appreciated but this sort of functionality has to be native.

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.

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. 

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.  @Zendesk Product Specialist 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.