The order of SLA policies

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher
Access Admin

One ticket gets one policy, the first that matches. Get the order wrong and your specific policies never apply.

First match wins, and stops

Zendesk works down the list and applies the first policy whose conditions match. Nothing below is considered, even if it is a better fit.

This is different from triggers, where everything matching runs. The difference catches people who learned triggers first.

The order that works

  1. Most specific first. A named customer, a particular contract tier.
  2. Then the groups. Premium customers, a particular brand.
  3. The catch-all last. Everything else.

Put the catch-all first and it matches every ticket, and every other policy you wrote is dead. It is the single most common SLA configuration fault, and nothing warns you because the configuration is valid.

How to tell it is happening

Open a ticket you know should be on your premium policy and look at which one it actually has. If it says the general one, ordering is the reason.

Reporting shows it too: a policy with no tickets against it in a month either has impossible conditions or is sitting below something that catches everything.

When the ticket changes

Policies are re-evaluated when a ticket changes in a way that affects the conditions. A ticket moved to another group can move to another policy, and its targets change with it. That is correct and occasionally surprising, and it is worth knowing when a ticket's remaining time jumps.

See also

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