SLA: Ticket escalates too early

Infos:

  • Used Zammad version: 3.1.x
  • Used Zammad installation source: (source, package, …)
  • Operating system: Ubuntu Linux 16.04.6
  • Browser + version: Firefox 69.0.1 (64-Bit)

The way we work in your company:

We are working by the following rules:

  • By response of a customer the ticket will automatically set to status “open”.
  • If we need some days to work on the ticket we set it to status “in progress”.
  • If we await a answer of the customer we set it to “waiting for customer”.

Expected behavior:

I would like to have a SLA for all tickets with the state new or open.
They should escalate if there was no answer from your team within a specific time. In this example I set it to 5 min for demonstration.

Now i expect the following:

  • Response of the customer: Ticket will be set to “open”.
  • Ticket will escalate if there is no response from the team within the next 5 min.

Actual behavior:


As you can see, the last customer response was 1 min ago and the ticket is already escalated.

The following happens:

  • Response of the customer: Ticket is set to “open”.
  • Ticket escalates directly because the last response of the team as not within the last 5 min.

Can someone please tell which setup will be right for our use case?
I am very grateful for any help.

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

I used the following SLA and Calender:


Please note that response, update and solve time are not calculated based on customer answers (because that’s the person that requieres you to hold up your SLA promisses), but based on agent interaction.

This means: If a ticket has been created at 1:00 pm, you put it to “sleep” at 1:02pm and your customer answers at 01:03pm, the ticket will regulary escalate at 01:05pm (based on your SLA rule).

Also, if your customer would answer at 2:00pm, the ticket would escalated instantly because you violated the SLA for 55 minutes.


Your agent needs to update the ticket in terms of a communication (thus call note or mail) for Zammad to recognize you to keep up with your SLA. Technically you can also allow noted to count as SLA, but that might have downsides in your workflow at some point.

In short: Escalation times are based on the ticket creation time or the last agent update in a communication term.

Thank you for this detailed explanation :relaxed:

In which scenario will i make sense to calculate the SLA’s based on only the agent communication?
Would it not be a lot more useful to have a SLA Rule based on customer and agent communication? :thinking:

Do have any idea how I can set this up for our requirements? :grinning:

Sorry, I have no usefull idea for this at the moment.
Edit: The SLA topic is a very complex topic and the provided information are not enough.
Please also note that the little time we can provide to the community, might not be enough to help you good enough in this case. I’m sorry.

Normally the answer would be no here (ignoring your possible use case).

Let’s take IT system houses as example, because this might be an easy example.

You have service contracts with your customers. In this contracts, you guruantee your customer that your initial reaction on his tickets / issues will be 1 hour (as example). In this case, it wouldn’t make any sense at all that if the customer adds another article (for whatever reason) to reset the time counter, to 60 minutes, because you didn’t react yet!

Update time forces the agent to communicate regulary with the customer in defined time span, over and over again. This doesn’t always make sense, but if it does, you don’t want to choose a too small value, because you’ll be busy with answerin instead with working on the issue directly.

Also, you can’t enforce SLA on your customer (if that’s the second thought), where would we go ? … :smiley:


Please don’t get me wrong, I’m understanding your approach, but with current possibilities it’s not possible to achieve this.

From this point, you have three options:

  • create a feature request and hope the feature to come somewhen in the future™
  • a custom development for an addon that enhances your Zammad instance with the wanted functionality
  • you custom code your own addon (see: Examples of zpm files? - #3 by thorsteneckel )

Thank you for your help :smile:

I solved the Problem by creating a scheduled Task.
The Task is check every day for Tickets with last contact more than 1 day in the past, at a specific status.
For all matches reminder mails are send to the agents.

Have a nice weekend
Demian :relaxed:

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