Understanding Response and Resolution Times in SLAs
It is sensible for your customers to expect that you resolve their tickets within a reasonably acceptable time. If not for a solution, a quick response to their email or a call back to their phone will do. While it is indeed important for your team to respond and resolve tickets quickly, here are some means to bring in the discipline in your approach:
- SLA Response Times
- SLA Resolution Times
- Business Hour Compliant SLAs
What is SLA Response Times
It is apparent that each ticket opened by your customers' presents a unique situation. For example, they can range anywhere between an outage in your product or a simple question about its features. So each ticket should be weighted based on their severity and responded accordingly. Thus the ticket response time gains significance.
Typically, response time is the amount of time between when the customer opens a ticket and when the agent first responds (automated responses don't count) and lets the customer know they’re currently working on it. In some cases, it can also extend to subsequent responses on the same ticket, i.e., the time between the oldest unanswered customer response and the following reply from an agent.
What is SLA Resolution Times
As with response times, it is important to ensure that the customer tickets get resolved in your help desk. Having a pre-defined resolution time lets customers know the quality of service they can expect once they contact your support center.
Typically, resolution time is the amount of time between when the customer first opens a ticket and when that ticket is solved (i.e., closed). Unlike the ticket replies, resolution SLAs use the status of tickets to compute the due periods. You can set the ticket resolution times based on the job priorities. For example, a product downtime issue will be resolved within three hours, a bug concerning a particular user will be fixed within 12 hours, and that feature request will be acknowledged within 48 hours.
When is a ticket considered resolved?
By default, a ticket is considered resolved when its status is marked as Closed. In addition to this, you can create custom statuses and map them to the closed state. Setting such closed-mapped statuses for tickets is also considered as resolved.
Business Hour Compliant SLAs
The SLA response/resolution times can be relative to your business hours, meaning it only considers the working hours of your support center.
For example, if your operating hours are 8AM-5PM, Monday to Friday, and a ticket is opened at 4 PM on Friday, then a resolution to this at 10 AM on the following Monday is a 3-hour resolution time considering your business hours.
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