V4 Update #10: SLAs, ticket escalation rules and work schedules

Welcome to the tenth in a series of Version 4 development updates and previews. Preview #9 looked at the new user management and organization features of V4.

In this preview we will take you through the changes and improvements we are introducing to ticket service level agreement plans, escalation rules and work schedules.

Don’t need SLAs? Don’t worry – we won’t bog you down in unnecessary detail

If you find that you do not need SLAs or escalation rules to effectively manage your support desk – don’t worry. You won’t get bogged down in unnecessary detail.

Out of the box, your Kayako support desk will use a simple default overdue time setting for all your tickets, allowing you to prioritise which tickets are in need of an update soonest. You can, if you wish, disable overdue tracking altogether.

Brushing up on SLAs in Kayako

In case you are a new to Kayako or haven’t yet needed to configure any SLA plans, here is a short brush-up on the state of SLA functionality in V3:

• Put simply, an SLA (service level agreement) plan governs the due time of a ticket. An SLA enables you to define your user’s expectations of your support centre. Kayako helps you define, manage and report on your response times. You can create multiple SLA plans and specify which tickets they govern by selecting a department, ticket status and ticket priority. You can also assign SLA plans to users and specific tickets.
• A work schedule defines the hours in a day during which the due time clock on a ticket doesn’t tick, so that tickets do not go overdue while your offices are closed. Multiple work schedules can be created and only one can be assigned to each SLA plan.
• An escalation rule is a set of prescribed actions that will be automatically carried out on a ticket that violates its SLA plan (goes overdue). These actions can, for example, include changes to ticket properties like the ticket’s owner and priority. An escalation rule can be assigned to a specific SLA plan, meaning it will only affect tickets governed by that plan.

A word about some ticket changes

Although not covered in detail in this particular preview, we are introducing some fairly major changes to tickets in your Kayako support desk. We need to describe a couple of them here so that the detail in the rest of this post makes sense.

• Resolved property of ticket statuses – tickets currently have a status (such as Open, On Hold, Closed, etc). In V4, we are adding a ticket resolved property to each status. When this property is enabled for a status, any ticket set to this status will be considered to be resolved by the system. A ticket set to any other status without this property set will be considered to be unresolved.
• Ticket resolution due time – tickets have an due time (as in your existing support desk), which is a time frame (set either manually or automatically) within which a ticket needs to be updated, else it will be marked as overdue. In V4, we are adding a resolution due time to tickets. This is a time frame within which the ticket must be marked as resolved, or the ticket will be marked as overdue.

Work schedule (working hours)

In V3, administrators can define work schedules - a set of working hours, with open and close times for each day of the week. The work schedule dictates during which hours of the day a ticket’s due time clock ticks. This ensures that tickets do not go overdue while your offices are closed.

In V4, we have enhanced the work schedule interface. Rather than just being able to specify just one block of opening hours per day, you can now set multiple. The interface has also been improved so that it is easier to see the state of the schedule at a glance.

Multiple work schedules can be created for assignment to specific SLA plans. In the example below, a ticket’s due time clock will not tick during 0900 – 1200 and 1400 – 1700 on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Saturday.

Holidays

We have implemented support for holidays – specific, fixed calendar dates during which you do not want the due time clock to keep running for a ticket assigned to a particular SLA plan.

V4 will ship with typical US national holidays. You will be able to download and import holiday packs published on our website, as well as create and share your own.

SLA plans

SLA plan properties in V4 generally remain very similar to V3. In practice, however, a lot has changed.

You can now configure a set of criteria which determine when a certain SLA plan will govern the due times of a ticket. For example, you can create an SLA plan that governs tickets in a specific department, of a certain priority and whether or not the ticket belongs to a particular user organization.

These SLA plan rules can be sorted, with some given a priority above others (kind of like a processing order).

The SLA plan in the example above will be used to govern tickets that;

• Are not resolved;
• Are set to the In Progress status and
• Belong to the General department.

Automatic ticket escalations

As in V3, escalation rules can be created to change the properties of a ticket that violates a particular SLA plan (goes overdue). In the example below;

• For tickets that are governed by the SLA plan Account audit SLA plan A;
• When the tickets go overdue;
• Change the ticket priority to High;
• Change the ticket status to Open;
• Flag the ticket and
• Tag the ticket with the tag ‘escalated’

Escalation rules can be configured to react only to ticket update due time violations, ticket resolution due time violations or both.

Feedback review

We feel passionately about engaging our customers in the 4.0 roadmap; giving them the opportunity to shape their future support desk.  In most V4 updates, we summarise some of the feedback we received on the last, as well as any subsequent decisions we have taken based on the feedback received.

And…. What happens with WP7? It looks very promising for enterprises due to Office and Outlook Integration.

(from Josemi)

Any plan for Windows Mobile as well? You will still have the web accessible mobile interfaces as well, correct?

(from Kyle Davies) We have no plans for Windows Mobile 7 right now. We are going to dedicate our resources to already well established mobile platforms. We will revisit the WM7 question when time resources allow.

Request: Gravatar support for Profile Pictures (for the clients/agents who don’t have yet uploaded a picture)

(from cenourinha) We won’t be supporting Gravatar. Perhaps, though, someone will make a small plugin to do this.

Question: why having “Restricted” and “Shared” organization types when you can have “User” or Manager” user roles? Both features kind of do the same right?

(from Andres Berdugo) The ability to select a “Manager” within a “Restricted” organization allows you to selectively give users the ability to see all other user’s tickets. The restricted/shared option is all or nothing.

What’s Kayako’s stance on v4 for the purposes of reselling?

(from Nick Walker) We have a number of plans about reselling and affiliate schemes. We’ll post about these soon.

If you disable a staff account, obviously that person won’t be able to log in any more, but what happens to the tickets currently assigned to that staff member?

(from Luke Pinion) The tickets remain assigned to that staff member.

Have you considered adding a support for sales leads? That way we can create a new kind of ticket which has a pipeline, and has a sale amount?

(from Daniel Martin) We are implementing a feature of tickets called ticket types. Out of the box you get the following types: Issue, Bug, Lead, Phone. Using ticket types, custom fields and the reporting engine, you should be able to achieve this.

Would be great to know about the support of telephone tickets, because in our country for example, there is a lot of people that call us for support or to request a service, witch doesn’t have an email, and we cant to be able to track them

(from Daniel Martin) We are implementing better support for tracking phone tickets.

With the new organisation filtering can a staff member also be given only access to certain companies and there / tickets … users etc…

(from Jeremy Otten) No, you can only restrict staff access to departments. However, by restricting user groups to certain departments, you can implicitly achieve this.

Will kayako v4 also support full RFC HTML e-mails.

(from Jeremy Otten) It will. We’re not sure if this will be the case on initial release, though. It might need to follow later.

This has probably already been covered, but the one request I get the most from my users is the ability (as a user/client, not staff) to search through their tickets either by TicketID or via their own criteria. Is this supported in V4?

(from Luc) Ticket searching for users will be in V4.

This might sound kinda like a dumb question, but with all of the changes and new features in V4, will it be possible to upgrade from V3 or will V4 need a re-implementation?

(from Tony Valenti) We’ll be providing an automated upgrade system, as we did with V2 -> V3.

Will V4 include satisfaction surveys or something like Amazon has when you contact them? At the end of each email is a link you can click to tell Amazon if the email solved your problem or not.

(from Jonathan Bloom) Yes, it will. We’ll post about these soon.

Can you please shed some light on multi-language capabilities ?

(from James) We’ll dedicate a V4 preview post to this specific topic soon.

Regarding pricing, I hope you won’t go to a per-agent formula.

(from shineyblue) We will be moving to a peragent (per seat) licensing scheme.

Will all the present addons work with V4 and when will it be realeased to the public

(from david) No, they won’t. We are developing new ones.

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As usual, we would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and requests on the community forum. Thanks for reading!