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SLA by Severity please? (not Priority)

Related products:Support
  • January 19, 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 12 views
David42

When just about every organisation manages their SLA responses by Severity, why does the SLA feature in Zendesk only allow us to define response targets based on the field that is called 'Priority' and the name of which can't be edited?

(even Zendesk apparently use Severity according to this link:https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051310494-Incident-Management-part-2-How-Zendesk-manages-service-incidents)

Any chance of Zendesk making a change so we could just be allowed to edit the name of the Priority system field to Severity (or select cutom fields as the basis for response targets in which case a custom field called Severity would be an easy solution)

Our end-users get confused when we ask them to select the priority that matches their incident severity. 

Thanks

    4 replies

    sphen11
    • sphen11
    • January 20, 2021

    David - you absolutely can have a customer-facing Severity field like Zendesk uses.

    There are two options: 

    1. If your custom Severity dropdown field has four values, you can just use a trigger to always update Priority to match. Sev 1 = Urgent, Sev 2 = High, etc.

    2. If you want more than four Severity values, you can effectively ignore/work around Priority & targets by creating different SLA Policies for each Severity dropdown value. You could even combine the different Severity SLA Policies with Priority for even finer control over SLAs (e.g. Sev 1 Urgent is handled even more urgently than Sev 1 Low). But that might be overkill.

    Does that help? Let me know if you need any clarification.

      David42
      • David42
      • Author
      • January 20, 2021

      Thanks for the help Stephen - using the Severity custom field as a condition to set up a separate SLA Policy for each of the Custom Severity levels was the piece I was missing. That should be enough to do what we need (unless I run into anything else that can't be triggered out of a custom field)

      I still think Zendesk should consider adding a standard field for Severity given it is such a key concept in most SLAs (with full and somewhat ironic acknowledgement that this makes me one of those end users that we support folk all enjoy dealing with who say things along the lines of 'well I think it should work this way').

      J
      • James119
      • September 27, 2021

      How do you create a customer-facing Severity field? 

      In thinking about how to route a Sev-1 Urgent to page the appropriate person within Zendesk, is it better to set-up an email alias specifically for that or can you configure to have a Sev-1 Urgent come in and it specifically ping a specific group of people?

      Thanks for any additional clarity here!

        Dave12
        • Dave12Employee
        • Employee
        • September 28, 2021

        Hi James,

        Instructions for adding custom ticket fields can be found here: Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request form

        The drop-down field type would be the best choice for a Severity field, and you'd want to set the permissions to "Read-only for end-users". (If you have multiple ticket forms, don't forget that you'll need to add the field manually to each form where you want it to be available.) Hope that helps!

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