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Understanding and Working with Support Plans

Support plans determine the scope of guaranteed service that can be provided to a client. It outlines the service usage information such as type of plan, credit cycle, credit usage for a specific period (weekly, quarterly, monthly, yearly) to the service provider and client.

A support plan is interlinked with a contract and SLA. While contract defines the timeline until which the plan is valid, an SLA delineates measurable expectations and allows for a level of accountability towards the client. It provides recourse to unmet service obligations often set with an alternate plan of action.

A support plan can be associated with multiple contracts. However, one contract can be associated with only one support plan at any given point.

In the example below, Amber automobiles is associated with two contracts and support plans. The T&C for each contract varies and so does the support plan. The service and support contract is valid for a limited period while the customer support and service doesn't have an end date.


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Users who have Manage Autommation permission can create and manage support plans.
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Creating Support Plans

Support plans comprise the following components:

Plan types

This decides the type of service that will be provided to the client and for how long. There are two types of plans:
  1. Unlimited - Resolve unlimited number of tickets within the contract period. The default plan type for all the existing active contracts will be set as Unlimited.
  2. Ticket-based - Number of tickets on which the SLA will be applied for the set time, for example 5 tickets/week, 20 tickets/month etc. According to this the SLA will apply on 5 tickets or 20 tickets per week respectively. The remaining tickets will not adhere to the selected SLA.

Service-Level agreement

A commitment that a service provider gives its client on the level of support that will be provided based on the severity of a ticket. The response and resolution time are pre-decided in an SLA.

Credit cycle and limit

A credit cycle can be weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. It determines the renewal period of a particular plan. Credit limit allows the service provider to set an upper limit for the service. For example, in a ticket-based plan for a yearly credit cycle the credit limit can be 50 tickets. This means that the service provider will resolve a maximum of 50 tickets in a year.
Note
  1. Plan type, credit cycle, and SLA cannot be changed once it is associated to a contract.
  2. A support plan is associated with an account through a contract.
  3. A support plan must always be linked to an SLA.
  4. Once a support plan is associated to a contract, it cannot be deleted. However, it can be discontinued. That is, new contracts cannot be associated with the plan.
To create a support plan
  1. Go to Setup > Automation > Support Plan.
  2. Click New Support Plan.
  3. In Plan Information, enter the Plan Name.
  4. Select the Plan type from the drop-down: Unlimited or Ticket-based.
  5. If you select Ticket-based, select the Credit Cycle (weekly, monthly etc.) and Credit Limit.
  6. Choose an SLA from the drop-down.
    All active SLAs available in the department will be listed.
  7. Click Save
To associate a support plan with contract
  1. From the top bar, select the Contracts module.
    It will be displayed on the top bar, only if the module is selected for the department. Go to Setup > Customization > Organize module, and select Contracts module.
  2. From the top bar (Quick action) click the + icon, to add New contract.
  3. In Contract Information, enter the following details:
    1. Contract owner - By default the person creating the contract will be the owner.
    2. Contract name
    3. Contract number
    4. Product name
    5. Account name - Choose an account to which this contract is applicable.
    6. Contract start date - The support plan will apply from this date.
    7. Contract end date
    8. Support plan - Select a plan that should be associated with the contract.
  4. In Contract Expiration Notification, select Whom to Notify and enter the number of days before it should notify.
  5. Click Submit.

Associating support plans with accounts

Once a support plan is created it needs to be associated with a contract which is linked to an Account.


Once an account is associated, the support plan and the contract details can be viewed in the following places:

Tickets detail page

When a ticket is raised, in the detail page by clicking the Contract icon on from the left panel, the detailed information about the contract and the support plan that the respective ticket adheres to will be displayed. The agents can view the contract validity period and the credit balance of an account.

The Contract tab and Support Plan information are visible on tickets only if the SLA associated with the support plan has been applied to the ticket.

Accounts detail page

In the Accounts detail page, on clicking the SLA and contracts icon, the list of contracts that the account is associated with will be displayed. For each contract, the support plan, associated SLA, and the validity period will be shown.

Contracts detail page

The Contract detail view will have contract and support plan as separate icons. Complete details of the contract and the support plan associated with it will be displayed here.


Helpful?62
Updated: 4 months ago
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11 comments
  • 11 months ago

A couple of questions:

  1. Is invoicing done at the Support Plan level? The issue of currently using Desk is that each ticket generates an individual invoice, so in your 50 Tickets example that would mean 50 Invoices vs ideally just a single invoice for the plan. 
  2. Can a Plan be hours based vs Tickets? We allow Unlimited tickets but have a plan based on hours consumed.

Hi, I too need this to have the option to create a plan around hours consumed, I thought that this was going to be one of the elements incorporated within this new feature?

I am looking for hour based contract tracking which is chipped away from the worklogs. 

  • 11 months ago

With the update, I cannot access the current Contract information and the Contract field has disappeared in the menus I have.

  • 11 months ago

One more voice to have time based credits also.
Because most of all developers and consultans work based on hours and not based on ticket qty.
For example you can work on 1 ticket 10 hours and one day later you work on 1 ticket 3 days.
So work based on ticket qty is not a good idea for most of all business. Better to work based on time in the support plans.

Do you plan to add this soon to zoho desk?

We definitely need a time-based depreciation method too! For us, and several of our clients, the customer can opt for what we call a bundle of hours. By choosing such a bundle, the customer gets a solid discount, and in return, pays for the bundle before work begins. The work we then deliver and log in Zoho Desk should, in many cases (so, optionally), be deducted from the purchased time! Is this something that's on the horizon?

Hello,

First of all, thank you for developing the long-awaited ticket counting topic under the Support Plan.

We make agreements with our customers based on the number of tickets, but we do not deduct all incoming tickets from this number. There was a Billable option when closing tickets in the ManageEngine Support Center application. If this option was selected, the number of tickets was deducted. Can such an improvement be made to the Support Plan feature in Zoho Desk?

Is it possible to increase the initial ticket credit limit after the customer has used up their tickets? Alternatively, can we offer additional ticket packages to customers once they have exhausted their initial allowance? Our company offers extra ticket packages to our customers for this specific purpose, and we would appreciate it if Desk could accommodate this feature as well.

Do support plans only include a single SLA? The selection box on the support plan creation window provided to us by your support team mentions multiple SLAs (as its name is plural) but you are stating in this help document that we should select a single SLA per support plan.

Our company is planning to implement a system of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for our support plans, which will be based on priority levels assigned to tickets. Based on the priority level of a ticket, our agents will manually set the appropriate SLA level. All priority-based SLAs will be included in the support plan, and a common ticket credit quota will be defined for all SLA levels. This means that customers will use their credits for both low and high-priority tickets. It's important to note that a shared credit quota will be used for all tickets, regardless of their priority level.


The "Contract Expiration Notification" feature should have an alternative way of notifying the agents by counting the remaining ticket credits. We can't foresee when the ticket limit is going to be exceeded but we can notify our agents and customers based on their remaining ticket credit limit. For example, we should be able to automatically notify our agents and customers when a contract associated with a support plan with 50 credits per year has used 48 tickets of its limit.

We would like to put a ticket into a special status (in our case "Contract Renewal") when the ticket credit of a specific support plan/contract has been exceeded. Desk should automatically put the tickets belonging to the expired contract into this status and when the credit limit has been renewed then those tickets should again automatically be put into the "Open" status. Both agents and customers associated with the ticket should receive system notifications of these changes. I have attached a blueprint snapshot to provide a visual representation of our requirements.

Blueprint with Ticket Credit Status.png
Blueprint with Ticket Credit Status.png597 KB
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