Managing urgent tickets and SLA

[Product User]

How can we make sure we meet SLA obligations for a customer, for example urgent tickets for a specific customer means that we need to be on their site in 3 hours… We need some engine that would inform us of our obligations when opening a ticket..

Also if the ticket is not handled in the SLA time frame, we need a way to make it stand out in the tickets list.


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[Support Team]

Re: Managing urgent tickets and SLA

The service terms of each Contract should be stored in the Contract Description and Internal Description (located in the Details tab) fields.
Whenever you open a new service Ticket for one of your customers and assign it to a Contract the Contract terms, stored in the fields listed above, are automatically displayed for the user (in the new Ticket window, as well as in the Tickets Details window – the Contract tab).

The person who opens the Ticket can then see the special SLA terms set for this customer and set the right value for the Ticket Due Date/Time field. For example, if in the contract it says that you should provide support in 3 hours then the person who opens the new Ticket will see it and set the Ticket Due Date field to 3 hours from now.

When viewing the Tickets list you can see the Due Date for each Ticket. You can also sort the open Tickets list by this field so you will know which Ticket should be handled first. When the Due Date expires and the Ticket is still open, the Due Date field is automatically displayed in red. This way the ticket will stand-out and it helps you know that the Ticket should have been handled and solved by now and the manager can escalate it and give it a higher priority.

You should also consider using the Pending tab of the Ticket to add Tasks with due date/time and popup reminders (say one hour before, 3 hours before etc.).

For example, if the server problem should be fixed by 5:00pm you can set up the Ticket Due Date field to 5:00PM, and also add a Task to handle the issue with reminders – 2 hours before and 1 hour before.