SLAs¶

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) ensure timely responses to customer requests. You can set these goals - such as responding to all inquiries within eight hours - with optional custom deadlines for specific customers. When such a deadline is passed, the ticket escalates. In other words: SLAs reflect the agreement you have with your customer about the processing time of tickets. To add or edit SLAs, navigate to Manage > SLAs. You need the permission admin.sla to manage them.

Quick Start¶

Set up your business hours in a calendar.
Create SLAs with different conditions and escalation time intervals.
Optionally create triggers or scheduler jobs to handle escalated tickets and/or tickets about to escalate.

Setup¶

Calendar¶

First of all, set up your business hours in a calendar. A calendar is used in an SLA to calculate escalation times based on your business hours. You can set up one general calendar or use multiple calendars which you can assign individually to your SLAs. In case you have specific business times for different customers or service levels, make sure that your calendars match the business hours of your service levels or individual customer agreements.

SLA Configuration¶

Create a new SLA by clicking the New SLA button. To edit an existing SLA, click on the Edit button in the SLA list. Both actions open the SLA configuration dialog, where you can adjust the settings below:

Screenshot shows configuration dialog for SLAs

Warning

Updating existing SLA configurations can cause temporary performance issues depending on your instance size and affected tickets. Try to perform such changes outside of your business hours.

Name

Provide a meaningful name to quickly see what the SLA is about.

Ticket Selector

Specify to which tickets this SLA should apply to based on conditions. This means you can filter tickets by checking their attributes, e.g. customer, organization or group.

Hint

👋 Looking for more depth explanation on conditions? 🤓

Many condition settings in Zammad, no matter if in ticket scope or not, re-appear in several places of Zammad. For this reason we created a dedicated documentation section to avoid duplicate content.

Have a look at Object Conditions to learn even more! 🎉

Preview

Based on your condition, you can see a preview of the matching tickets to double check if your condition is correct.

Calendar

As mentioned above, SLAs use calendars to calculate escalation times. Choose the correct calendar here, otherwise the SLA calculation may be incorrect. If you haven’t set your business hours yet, see Calendars to learn more.

SLA Times

Define the escalation time intervals based on your working hours. It is up to you if you set one, two or all three times. When a SLA time is reached, the ticket escalates. Keep in mind: if you define 8 hour business hours per day, a 16 hour SLA time interval will lead to a ticket escalation in 2 business days.

First Response: Time interval for the first response (external call, email). This time is calculated based on the ticket creation time and does not reset if you’re moving the ticket into another group or apply other changes.
Update Time: Time interval for every following response (external call, email). This time either counts from ticket creation (if no first response is set) or after the last response time. You can choose between two modes:
- between agent updates: In this mode, agents have to respond every defined interval, no matter if the customer replied or not.
- for an agent to respond: In this mode, agents have to respond after a customer replies. In case there is no new customer reply after the last agent response, no escalation time is calculated for updating the ticket.
Solution Time: Time interval for solving the problem and setting the ticket to a closed state type. This calculation ignores ticket updates unless they solve and close it.

First Response and Solution Time can only apply once per ticket. Update Time can apply once (“for an agent to respond” mode when no new customer reply has been received) or applies multiple times until the ticket has been solved (“between agent updates” mode).

By default, the states pending close, pending reminder and closed are ignored for the SLA calculation. Tickets in one of these states are freezed: they are displayed as not escalated and escalation times are not visible. However, as soon as the ticket set to open (e.g. by a customer responding), the ticket may instantly escalate, depending on its age and your set intervals.

Tips¶

Avoid Escalations: Create a trigger or scheduler job to move escalated tickets to a special group or agent. You can even re-dispatch tickets before they escalate.
Adjust SLA-Relevant Article Types: If communication type articles are not enough for your use-case, you can configure Zammad to consider public notes as fulfillment for an SLA. To turn this on, please have a look at the console commands (system docs).
Multiple SLAs: In case you define several independent SLAs, ensure to have no overlapping tickets as their calculations may not work as intended or are conflicting.
Ticket State Conditions: For standard use-cases, you can safely skip ticket states in your ticket selector conditions. Zammad’s built-in states already have a flag SLA ignored flag so tickets in closed state types are ignored from SLA calculations.
Overviews: If you have all/most of your tickets covered by SLAs, you may consider changing the default sorting of existing overviews by escalation time, instead of creation time.

Agent Perspective¶

Now that you set up SLAs, you might wonder how this works in practice. Read on about what your agents will see and what they can do.

SLA Times in a Ticket: The ticket detail view provides a timestamp of the next escalation. By hovering over that timestamp, agents can see all upcoming escalation times in a pop-up.
Notifications: Zammad will warn agents roughly 15 minute before escalation and when the ticket finally escalates. In addition to the built-in notifications, Zammad will also warn agents by sending out an email. This depends on the notification configuration of your agents (which can be configured in the profile settings).
Overviews: You can configure Overviews to allow your agents to filter for escalated tickets or those that are about to escalate. By default, Zammad comes with an overview that will show all tickets that are either escalated or escalating within the next 10 minutes: Escalated Tickets.