SLAs and approvals

Service level clocks with goals and calendars, and the approvals and satisfaction ratings on a request.

A helpdesk promises how fast it answers. SLA clocks measure each request against that promise, and approvals and satisfaction ratings record the decisions made on it and what the customer thought of the answer. All of them appear in the Helpdesk panel of the request's page. The helpdesk itself is described on Helpdesk.

SLAs

An SLA is a clock with a goal, such as four hours to a first response. Every clock on a ticket shows in the Helpdesk panel of the ticket page: its name, whether it is running, paused, met or breached, the time left or over, and when it was last calculated. Queues show each ticket's tightest clock as a chip, red once breached.

Clocks are defined per project in the project settings. A clock has:

• a name and a goal (4h, 30m, 2d);
• optionally, a calendar of working hours it counts against, in the calendar's own time zone (such as Europe/Berlin; a zone that does not exist is refused);
• the events that start, pause and stop it: the ticket being created, a customer commenting, an agent replying with a public comment, the ticket being assigned, a resolution being set or cleared, and the ticket entering a status. A pause on "in status X" holds the clock until the ticket leaves X;
• optionally, further goals for particular customers ("two hours for ACME, four for everyone else"), added on its row. A customer's contract can also promise its own target, which comes before the clock's goals for that customer's requests.

Stopping completes a cycle. A later start event, such as the customer commenting again after resolution, begins a new one, and the panel shows the current cycle.

Alba calculates each clock from the ticket's own history, so it is re-run whenever the ticket changes and every quarter hour so that time passing alone can breach it. Definitions imported from Jira Service Desk run the same way; a definition whose Jira conditions have no equivalent here is flagged in the project settings and keeps only the conditions Alba understands.

Approvals and satisfaction

The same panel shows approvals requested on the ticket, with each approver's decision, and the customer's satisfaction rating and comment once they have left one. Both come across from Jira Service Desk.

If you are one of the approvers and have not decided yet, the panel offers Approve and Decline. One decline settles the whole approval; it is approved once every approver has approved, and until then it stays pending. Either way the decision is recorded in the ticket's history with who made it. Once you have decided, or the approval is settled, the buttons go.