Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Each target measures something different and pauses at different moments. Choosing the wrong one is why SLAs behave oddly.
The targets
| Target | Measures |
|---|---|
| First reply time | Creation to your first public reply. The one customers feel. |
| Next reply time | Each customer message to your next reply. Applies repeatedly. |
| Periodic update | Maximum silence on a ticket you are working. For long investigations. |
| Pausable update | The same, but the clock stops while you are waiting on the customer. |
| Requester wait time | Total time the customer spent waiting on you. |
| Agent work time | Time the ticket spent in a state where you owed something. |
| Total resolution time | Creation to solved. |
Which to use
First reply time. Start here and possibly stop here. It is what customers notice, it is easy to explain, and it is achievable.
Next reply time is the natural second, because a fast first answer followed by three days of silence is worse than a slower steady conversation.
Resolution time is the one to be careful with. Much of a long resolution is waiting for the customer, or for a supplier, and neither is something you control. It reads well in a contract and behaves badly on a dashboard.
When the clock pauses, and when it does not
This is where most SLA surprises come from, because the pausing belongs to the metric rather than to the policy. There is no switch to make a target pause on a status: you pick a target that already excludes it.
| First reply time | Does not pause on any status |
| Next reply time | Does not pause on any status. It is not running while no customer comment is unanswered |
| Periodic update | Does not pause on any status |
| Pausable update | Runs in New, Open and On-hold. Pauses on Pending |
| Requester wait time | Counts New, Open and On-hold. Pauses on Pending |
| Agent work time | Counts New and Open. Pauses on On-hold and Pending |
| Total resolution time | Includes Pending. Stops only when the ticket is solved |
So a first reply target keeps counting through the night and through a pending ticket. If what you want to measure is only the time the ball was in your court, that is Agent work time, the one target that stops for both Pending and On-hold.
Pausable update has a starting condition worth knowing
It does not begin until an agent has made a public comment while the ticket is not Pending. And there is a trap in the ordinary way of working: if the agent answers the customer and sets the ticket to Pending in the same submit, the target does not apply at all. It only starts once the ticket has been submitted at least once in New, Open or On-hold with a public comment.
The same applies to restarting. After it pauses on Pending, it resumes when the status goes to Open or On-hold with a public comment or an internal note, not on the status change alone.
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