You can useSLAsandchild ticket side conversationsto create operational-level agreements (OLAs), internal to your company, between twogroupsof agents about how quickly one group responds to and resolves tickets from another group. For example, let’s say you want to create an OLA between your support team and shipping team that legal questions will be answered within 6 hours and solved within 48 hours.
This article contains the following sections:
- Creating OLAs with child ticket side conversations
- Metrics activated by OLAs for child ticket side conversations
Related articles:
Creating OLAs with child ticket side conversations
While SLAs are intended to be a policy between the company and the customers, companies with complex workflows that involve multiple teams in the solving of tickets need SLA-like functionality to create and enforce agreements between them. These agreements between teams are commonly referred to as operational level agreements, or OLAs. OLAs make it possible to more easily enforce an agreement between two internal teams.
Child tickets are created with a new “side conversation” channel type, which provides a condition that SLAs can use to ensure that the policy is only applied to internal tickets created from a parent ticket. This condition, in addition to a group condition, makes it possible to create workflows where one team creates tickets assigned to another team with agreed upon response times, wait times, update times, etc.
To create an OLA with child ticket side conversations
- Enable child ticket side conversations.
- Create or update an SLA policyto include these conditions:
(Optional) Group + Is + (specify a group) If the SLA policy doesn’t include a group condition, it’s not really an OLA since an OLA is an agreement between two groups. Without it, all agents in your Support account are equally responsible for fulfilling the agreement.
Channel + Is + Side conversation
- (Optional) Include the term OLA in the SLA policy’s name, so that it’s easier to identify your OLAs at a glance.
When a child ticket side conversation is created that meets the conditions in an SLA policy, the SLA policy is applied to the ticket. The ticket interface tells the assigned agent what stage the SLA policy is in and how much time they have left to fulfill the agreement.
For information creating a view so you more easily find tickets with your OLA, seeSeeing SLA statuses in views.
Metrics activated by OLAs for child ticket side conversations
When a child ticket side conversation is created or updated via a public comment, and an SLA policy is applied to it, theFirst reply time规被激活,但前提是创造者和requester of the child ticket are the same agent.
AfterFirst reply timeis fulfilled and the requester adds a new public comment to the child ticket, theNext reply timemetric is activated.First reply timeandNext reply timeare fulfilled when an agent who isn’t the requester adds a public comment to the child ticket, or the ticket is submitted asSolved(seeUnderstanding how SLA policies are applied to tickets).
It’s also important to note thatmarking the side conversation as Done in the parent ticketdoesn’t fulfillFirst time replyandNext time replymetrics when an SLA is applied to a child ticket. This is because the SLA is applied to the child ticket, not the parent ticket. For more information about the inheritance pattern between parent and child ticket side conversations, seeAbout side conversation child tickets.
7 Comments
Is there also a way to report on these OLA's in Explore?
Hey Thomas,
Thanks, that's a great question! You can report on these in Explore, using the SLA dataset. To isolate and report just on the "OLAs" you can add a filter on ticket channel, and restrict to "side conversation". Like this:
Hi! Is there a way to define and apply OLA policies for standard tickets (not using side conversations)? Thanks!
LengowNot yet, but this is something we're actively working on! Expect to release it in Q1 next year.
Thank youScott Allison! Looking forward to that release!
Please note that Growth plan does not support Side Conversations and therefore this article is marked incorrectly.
On another note, looking forward to OLAs being implemented on Zendesk this year.
Thanks Jeremy!
Yes, we're all pretty excited about the upcoming OLAs.
Good catch by the way. I've updated the article accordingly.
Pleasesign into leave a comment.