Functionality to pause an SLA

Hi @Scott Allison, What is the status of these SLA?

Thank you in advance for your feedback! 

[This comment originally posted in April 2022]

Thanks everyone for your patience and support! Last year I provided an update that SLAs were a top priority, and we had plans for a number of enhancements. I can confirm that work is in progress, and the very first customer facing change has rolled out: an easier way to see upcoming SLA breaches.

The next big change will be the ability to apply "Group SLAs" on tickets as well as SLAs. That will be available to early adopters in Q4 and be generally available in Q1. After that, we'll deliver alerts on SLAs in near real-time instead of once an hour for Automations. 

We do plan to address this request as well, at some point in H1 2023. If this is functionality you cannot wait for I'd encourage you to check out one of our partners, Cloudset, who offer this kind of functionality today.

Beyond excited and surprised to be finding myself on this page the day after a major product announcement on the topic from Zendesk! Thank you!

Wow, what an unacceptable answer... pay yourself (Cloudset) rather than we pay and build a clearly desired function.  Make it the customers problem.  

Zendesk could also make multiple business hours available to more of your customers, not just enterprise, so that SLAs aren't hamstrung by having global teams with different operating hours.  Schedules and SLA are symbiotic and not having multiple business hours removes much of the value of SLA.  I don't need to pause if the clock can accurately stop when teams aren't working.

Disappointing to see Zendesk's stance on this issue.  

2023 is almost over, and this functionality "planned for H1 2023" has received no further updates.

It's really as simple as adding a Next Reply Time SLA that does not trigger when the ticket is either "pending" or "on-hold". Would love an update on this

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.

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.

Thanks Scott for the update! Will be looking forward to these enhancements!

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.

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!

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.   

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.

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? 

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

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? 

Adding a comment that allowing admins to add “On-Hold” to the pauseable updates SLA would be helpful for both my current company & previous company who use Zendesk. Both groups use “On-hold” for when we send tickets internally to our Engineering team for fixes our deeper investigation, so the Support team does not have the same SLAs for response as when the ticket is Open & actively with them for regular follow-up. I've added my feedback to your google form submissions as well!