Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Enterprise or higher, Support Enterprise |
| Access | Admin |
An operational level agreement is an internal promise between teams. Child tickets are how you measure one properly.
The idea
Your customer sees one promise on the parent ticket. Underneath, each internal team that touches it has its own commitment, measured on its own ticket.
That separation is what lets you keep a customer promise while also holding an internal team to something realistic.
How to build it
- Turn on child tickets: in Admin Center, click Workspaces and select Agent tools > Side conversations, tick Turn on child tickets and save. They are off by default.
- When work goes to another team, create a child ticket rather than an email.
- Under Objects and rules > Business rules > Service level agreements, write a policy with the condition Channel Is Side conversation. Add a group condition when the OLA belongs to one team.
- Set the targets that team has agreed to: First reply time starts when the child ticket is created, and Next reply time after that.
- Optionally add a trigger putting the parent on hold while the child is open, so it leaves your own queue.
One thing to explain to agents before they meet it: the child's targets are met when somebody other than the requester adds a public comment to the child ticket, or it is solved. Marking the side conversation Done on the parent does not do it, because the clock belongs to the child.
Why child tickets rather than group SLAs
Both work and they suit different shapes.
- Group SLA when the ticket moves to another team and comes back. One ticket, several stages.
- Child ticket when the other team's work is genuinely separate and can run alongside yours. Two pieces of work, two clocks.
Child tickets also give the other team their own queue, which matters when they are not a support team and do not live in your views.
The number to watch
How long children stay open. That is your internal handover time, and it is usually the largest single component of a slow resolution and the one nobody was measuring.
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