SLA badge to calculate in Business hours

+1

Hi Jonas! Hi Alexandre! 

The SLA badge is designed to help agents prioritize their work in real time. It's important for the badge to be on the same scale for all tickets, so agents can tell which targets are more urgent.

For example, imagine that it's 4pm on a Friday, and an agent has time for one more ticket before they clock out. There are two tickets in the queue, and both tickets have a 2-hour SLA target. One ticket's target is in calendar hours, so it's due at 6pm that same day. The other ticket's target is in business hours on a weekday 9-5 schedule, so it's due at 10am on Monday.

If both tickets had a "2 hour" SLA badge, the agent would likely handle them at the same priority. There wouldn't be any clear difference to help the agent pick one over the other. In this simple example, though, you'd want the agent to prioritize the calendar hours ticket. That ticket will breach sooner, so it should be worked first.

That's why SLA badges always show calendar hours. Even though these two example tickets have the "same" 2-hour target, they're actually due at different times. The badge will show "2 hours" for the calendar hours ticket and "2 days" for the business hours ticket. That way, the agent knows - at a glance - which ticket is more important for Friday afternoon.

I hope this helps!

@amy43 Interesting take on why that was chosen. If you solely use business hours as a company, seeing calendars hours can actually be quite confusing on a Friday afternoon and not necessarily suggest the urgency of ticket (note agents can be trained for this, however we want to make their life easier). 

Example - Business hours are 9-5pm, Mon to Friday, a ticket is set to breach on Monday at 10am, the SLA counter would show that ticket has plenty of time to be resolved (2days), however in reality it probably needs to be actioned on the Friday - especially if it will take longer than an hour to work through. For organisations that solely works off business hours with SLAs, I'm not sure why there isn't a configuration option to adjust the timer? 

Hi @Jarrad Richards! A business hours badge could work, but it would require total consistency: one schedule that never changes; no holidays (or exhaustively communicated holidays); all users in the same time zone; no SLA targets in calendar hours, ever.

If there's any variation in any of those points, a business hours badge becomes ambiguous. Multiple schedules, schedule changes, different regions, and different SLA policies all impact how much time is actually left on a target. Agents could no longer take the badge at face value.

Even if there is total consistency, SLA badges round their numbers to hours (or days) when the target is far enough away. This means two tickets could both have a "2 business hours" badge, but one is due Friday at 4:50pm while the other is due Monday at 9:10am. Agents should prioritize the Friday ticket, but they need an easy way to know which is which.

SLA badges in business hours put a burden on agents. Before agents can act on a badge, they'd need to interpret that number in relation to the schedule and their current time. That mental math is taxing, even in simple environments. In more complex environments, it's prohibitive. 

SLA badges are designed to quickly prioritize workflows. It's important to ensure that they're all on the same scale, regardless of account complexity, and that the scale is intuitive at a glance. That's why badges show real time remaining. This allows agents to see accurate deadlines, without any extra effort required.

I hope this helps!

Thanks @amy43. I agree 100% the approach to ensure scalability and upkeep the 'Follow the Sun' model. 

Appreciate the discussion, here in ANZ, majority of customer don't need to service 'many' regions or are on Zendesk Support Professional, however to align with Zendesk's core values of the product, calendar hours makes the most sense.

Much Appreciated Amy!

We really need an option to show badges for business hours. We don't provide SLA's outside of business hours, but currently we have issues where the SLA expires minutes after agents come online in the morning. Prioritizing ticket work already requires our agents to have insights into the priority level, customer tier and SLA expiration dates. For us there is no downside to showing SLA's in business hours.

Thank you everyone for continuing to share your needs for this. Unfortunately, this is not on our current roadmap, so I will mark the status of this as Not Planned for now. That could change based on customer demand though, so please keep your feedback coming.

We do though have a number of major enhancements planned for SLAs in 2024. First up, the ability to customize exactly how SLA targets are 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. Later next year we'll offer realtime alerts, notifications and reminders. The goal of that is to make sure you hit your SLAs. 

Thanks again for your feedback, we truly appreciate it.

Hi @amy43 

Just want to clarify something regarding what you mentioned on SLA badge rounding up: "SLA badges round their numbers to hours (or days) when the target is far enough away. This means two tickets could both have a "2 business hours" badge, but one is due Friday at 4:50pm while the other is due Monday at 9:10am. Agents should prioritize the Friday ticket, but they need an easy way to know which is which."

Our FRT SLA is set to 3hrs. We have 2 tickets and SLA shows as:

Ticket#1: Received 40mins ago and FRT Next SLA badge is displayed as 2h (2h 20min to be exact but shows as 2h)

Ticket#2: Received 20mins ago and FRT Next SLA badge is displayed as 3h (2h 40min to be exact but shows as 3h)

How does the system round the SLA to be displayed?

Thanks!

Hi @riah 

Thanks for the question! Your example is spot on. If the time remaining is 2:20, the badge will round down and show “2h.” If the time remaining is 2:40, the badge will round up and show “3h.” The exact halfway point - 2:30 - also rounds down to “2h.”

SLA badges have three different units: minutes, hours, and days. They start displaying the next unit up when that unit rounds to 2. For example, a target of 36 hours and 30 minutes would round down to a “36h” badge. A target of 36 hours and 31 minutes would round up to 37 hours, which then rounds up to “2d.”

There is no unit above “days." If you have a 2-year target, you'll see “730d” in the badge. There is also no unit below “minutes.” When the target is at or below 30 seconds, you'll see “now” in the badge.

I hope this helps!

Hi @amy43 ,

Thanks for the quick response! If both tickets show 2h, with one as round down and one as round up, will the system sort them correctly based on actual time left/passed?

Hi @riah -

Correct again! Zendesk functions - including views, automations, and analytics - use the full timestamp of the SLA target. That means views should consistently show a 1:40 ticket ahead of a 2:20 ticket, even though they both show a “2h” badge. The badge is just there as a quick visual indicator for agents.

I hope this helps!

+1 - Would like to have the SLA badge ‘Pause’ outside of business hours. Instead of something that could be potentially be missed by 1 hour on a Friday afternoon displaying -1H, on Monday morning it will display -3D. This does not give an accurate representation of an SLA that is set in business hours.