SLA based on internal notes

Our teams could also really use this functionality.  While there are custom workarounds that may help with this, we really need a supported method from Zendesk.  

Hi @scott - Happy to know that this is being prioritized. Hope to see this feature soon.

The use cases for us here is -

1.

The end-user sends an original query to a light agent outside of ZD. The light agent then forwards it to ZD, where the agent will work on it and communicate back the answer to the light agent as an internal note and close the ticket.

2. 

The public comment from an end-user creates the ticket. ZD agent will have a communication with the light agent through the internal note. In this scenario, the ZD agent will not go back to the end-user with a public reply, but that is being taken care of by the light agent outside the ZD.

Currently, the FRT is not calculated/captured in either case. We have 1500+ such scenarios for the period Jan - April 2021. Having this feature will be highly appreciated as we are missing those valuable stats as of today.

Thanks

Rishi

@Scott Allison are there any new updates to this?

Thank you everyone for your patience, I can share an update. The good news is we have kicked off engineering on a foundational project that will support many future enhancements to our SLA capabilities. Once we complete this first phase we'll start work on adding new features, expected sometime in Q4.

In the meantime, we have new documentation on how you can measure internal workflows using child tickets and SLAs. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404111727514-Defining-OLA-policies-using-internal-SLAs-and-child-ticket-side-conversations

While this does require a child ticket for each step, we do also plan to support reassignment workflows too. This is where a ticket is reassigned to one or more groups and each step has its own internal SLA, as well as the overarching customer-facing SLA. This is something we'll be working on too and I'll share progress when I can. 

@Scott Allison, Is there any update on this progress of this?

@meg12 We're actively working on SLAs right now. I don't have a more specific timeline I can share right now but these improvements will start launching in the first half of next year.  

@Scott Allison We are really excited to hear more about the capabilities that you are developing as our organization additionally has several reassignment workflows within our internal teams each with different desired SLAs. We'd love the ability to prioritize the SLA targets within an SLA policy, be able to reassign with ease and be able to have internal notes or public comments start SLAs for internal teams. If there is any way to share more about what features might be included in the release that you are mentioning as well as any guidance on timeframes, this would be really helpful!

@Scott Allison Any update on this?  I have the same Question as Krista above, are you able to share SLA features that are upcoming and the timeframes of them?

Originally posted in 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 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.

Hi @Scott Allison 

The last 3 years it was possible to activate a SLA with a ticket update via API and a empty end user comment body:

{
"ticket": {
"comment": {
"body": "",
"author_id": 376666831978,
"public": true
}
}
}

Since july 29 nothing happens anymore. Before the change, the SLA was started with such API request. See this screenshot:

We used this workflow for quite different cases, e.g.
- Starting the SLA for proactive tickets
- Starting the SLA after adding internal comments
- Restarting the SLA because only one public comment was sent as an intermediate message, but a follow-up message must be sent to the customer within a new SLA.

All these cases were realized with a trigger + webhook + the API call above.

So we have to know why was this changed? What are the new workarounds to realize the cases shown?

The last update was in September.

This needs to be fixed.

I have a triage group that assigns tickets to the general queue in a FIFO, which can be overridden by priority.

My agents need to see the SLAs on these tickets, and I need to report on them.

This is a relatively easy change; have the first-time response to measure when an agent added a public comment onto the ticket for the first time, regardless of how it was created.

Thank you everyone for your continued interest in this. I'd like to provide you with an update.

We recently launched two enhancements to our SLA capabilities, introducing more targets and giving you more options to put targets on your workflow:

1. Group SLAs
2. Total Resolution Time

Coming in Q3 will be the ability to apply reply-time metrics to Chat and Messaging conversations.

Our final release of the year will deliver the ability to customize what activates and fulfills SLA metrics. This will plug common gaps right now where reply time metrics don't get applied to a ticket, as well as the ability to fulfill an SLA metric with an internal note, instead of a public reply. I'll update this thread again with more specifics as we get closer to launch. 

@Scott Allison and @scott17

Really looking forward to those future releases, especially that last one, I'm doing some pretty elaborate tricks to get visibility on our SLA blind spots.

Thanks for your continued interest in this capability! I want to provide an update on our progress here after my last update a few months ago. We plan to deliver the ability to customize what activates and fulfills SLA metrics. This will plug common gaps right now where reply time metrics don't get applied to a ticket, as well as the ability to fulfill an SLA metric with an internal note, instead of a public reply.

This is still something we plan to work on but it's been delayed and unfortunately won't be released this year. We now expect to release this during the first half of next year. There may be an EAP in Q1, so if that is the case I will post here about it. 

I'm disappointed we didn't get this done in Q4, but I do want to highlight an alternative which may be a suitable stop gap in some situations.

Earlier this year we launched Group SLAs (available to Enterprise plans). The Group Ownership Time target only takes account of two things for measurement. The group assignment and the ticket status. It's not looking at comments at all, whether private or public. More about Group SLAs here. We also just announced an enhancement to Group SLAs meaning you can now specify more conditions in the policy definition, giving you a lot more flexibility on when to apply a Group SLA. Read the announcement.

We also made some other enhancements to SLAs this year, launching a new SLA metric, Total Resolution Time and also bringing reply-time SLAs to Messaging.

We have other enhancements planned for 2024, and I'll continue to keep you posted. Thanks again for the feedback, it's truly appreciated.

Thanks for your continued interest in this capability! I want to provide an update on our progress here after my last update a few months ago. We plan to deliver the ability to customize what activates and fulfills SLA metrics. This will plug common gaps right now where reply time metrics don't get applied to a ticket, as well as the ability to fulfill an SLA metric with an internal note, instead of a public reply.

This is still something we plan to work on but it's been delayed and unfortunately won't be released this year. We now expect to release this during the first half of next year. There may be an EAP in Q1, so if that is the case I will post here about it. 

I'm disappointed we didn't get this done in Q4, but I do want to highlight an alternative which may be a suitable stop gap in some situations.

Earlier this year we launched Group SLAs (available to Enterprise plans). The Group Ownership Time target only takes account of two things for measurement. The group assignment and the ticket status. It's not looking at comments at all, whether private or public. More about Group SLAs here. We also just announced an enhancement to Group SLAs meaning you can now specify more conditions in the policy definition, giving you a lot more flexibility on when to apply a Group SLA. Read the announcement.

We also made some other enhancements to SLAs this year, launching a new SLA metric, Total Resolution Time and also bringing reply-time SLAs to Messaging.

We have other enhancements planned for 2024, and I'll continue to keep you posted. Thanks again for the feedback, it's truly appreciated.

Any updates on this @Permanently deleted user @scott17  ?

@ciprian13 We're currently working on these enhancements and hope to announce in the next few months. 

+1

We need this for our use case:

• Customer sends email to Light Agent who is a Non-Support team member. 
• Light Agent forwards customer email to our support email address which creates a ticket in Zendesk. 
• Since the forwarded email gets inserted as an internal note, the First Reply timer is not being fired. 
• Even when one of our Support agents now replies to the customer within seconds, the First Reply SLA has not been met yet. 
• When the customer then replies, the First Reply times starts ticking. 
• This results in our Support agents needing to reply to the second message within our First Reply SLA to adhere to it. 

A possible solution would be one of the following for me: 

1. Include internal notes and start the First Reply timer right away. 
2. Completely ignore tickets that start with an internal note from the SLA metric. 

^ We have the exact same use case. Our SLA reporting is consistently inaccurate due to weekly “breaches” on tickets that we have already replied to, and we need to spend manual time reviewing all breaches to determine what is and is not legitimate. 

The solution to have a First Reply timer fire right away from internal notes (especially when a ticket is created by a Light Agent forwarding a customer email) would be ideal. 

I'm very hopeful this release does not continue to be delayed. 

+1 here

Any news on when this might be coming?

Hey everyone, thanks for your continued interest in this capability. We're working on it right now, so keep your eyes open for an announcement in the next few weeks!

I wanted to provide you all with an update here, and point you to a release that we started rolling out today. 

We're introducing advanced settings to 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.

It addresses these needs

• Ensure end user tickets can have first reply time applied for all common use cases
• Apply SLAs when a CC’d end user replies to a ticket (next reply time)
• Apply First and Next Reply Time SLAs when an agent or light agent is the requester on a ticket
• Apply or fulfill First, Next and Periodic Update SLAs with internal notes

Read more in the announcement here:

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

Is there an updated ETA for this feature?

Is there an update for this feature? It was rolled out and rolled back. The customizable settings to allow internal notes to fulfill SLAs is desperately needed for my team's workflow.