Support tickets and SLA: how to track the response time you promised

“I opened my ticket quite a while ago and there’s still no reply.” It is one of the sentences support teams hear most often. Most of the time the problem is not the quality of the answer; the problem is that nobody knows who holds the ticket or by when it must be answered. The customer feels kept waiting, while the team does not realize that they are the ones doing the waiting.

An SLA (service level agreement) is the time commitment in which you tell the customer how quickly you will respond to or resolve a support ticket. In this article we explain how an SLA can be tracked in everyday support work, using the ticket page in YazSis CRM AI.

Three common mistakes in SLA tracking

• The ticket has no clear owner. A ticket that lands in a shared mailbox is seen by everyone, and that is why nobody takes it. An unassigned ticket is a ticket whose clock keeps running but which is on nobody’s list. Every ticket should have a single person responsible.
• The time lives apart from the ticket. If the SLA time is written in a contract or a spreadsheet, the person handling the ticket often does not know it. The time should be visible next to the ticket; the person replying should notice the urgency in the course of the work, without having to open a spreadsheet to check.
• Internal talk gets mixed up with the customer reply. While the team writes to each other “let’s check this first”, that note can accidentally go to the customer. Or it is never written down and the information stays in one person’s head. When an internal note is kept in a separate area the customer does not see, communication stays clean and the ticket can be handed to someone else without trouble.

What should a single ticket page contain?

In YazSis CRM AI a ticket runs on a single page. The reply to the customer, an internal note only staff can see, attachments, status, priority and assignment are all in the same place; the SLA target also sits next to the ticket. So the person handling the ticket sees, without leaving the page, both what to do and how much time is left.

• Reply: the message and attachments the customer will see.
• Internal note: research and handover notes that only staff can see.
• Assignment and priority: the ticket’s owner and its urgency.
• SLA target: the response time that was given, shown next to the ticket.

Tickets can be opened in three ways: from the customer’s own panel, through the KurumsalPortal bridge, or by staff acting on the customer’s behalf. When a customer using KurumsalPortal opens a ticket from the portal, it lands in the center; the reply given from the center returns to the portal. The customer panel also lets the customer rate a closed ticket from 1 to 5.

How does a ticket progress on the page?

A fictional scenario: a customer company reports a problem through KurumsalPortal; the ticket lands in the center and is assigned to one of the support team. The SLA target is visible on the ticket page. While investigating, the support specialist writes their own notes in the internal note and sends the customer only a clear reply. The reply returns to the portal and the customer sees the answer on their own screen. When the ticket is closed, the customer rates it. No step in this chain depends on a mailbox, a personal spreadsheet or a phone note; everything moves within a single record.

Where does a manager look in the morning?

1. Tickets past the SLA. The dashboard brings overdue tickets to the front; this is the first place to look, because the customer is already waiting.
2. Tickets assigned to you. Your personal queue gathers the work you need to answer during the day and makes the priority clear.
3. Licenses about to expire and silent installations. Support is not only answering tickets; a license about to expire, or an installation that has not reported its status for a long time, also needs close follow-up.
4. Ratings of closed tickets. Reviewing low-rated tickets shows the quality of the reply as well as its speed.

SLA is not only about speed

A fast but incomplete reply protects the time, not the customer. That is why the SLA should be read together with the satisfaction rating. Tickets that were answered within the time but received a low rating show where the process falters: was information missing, did the handover take long, or was the customer answered in a more technical language than necessary? Response time is a target; the aim is for the customer’s problem to actually be solved, and confusing the two leads to managing the SLA wrongly.

When setting times, it also helps to take priority into account. If a fault that stops production and a question about a screen setting are tied to the same time, either the urgent job runs late or needless pressure builds up on ordinary jobs. First separate tickets into priority levels, then discuss times according to those levels. Reviewing the tickets that exceeded their time, one by one, at the end of every week is also a good habit: when you find out why one overran, you usually meet not a missing rule but a missing assignment or a late piece of information. Fixing it there is a far more lasting solution than lengthening the times.

YazSis CRM AI is used in this way today in YazSis’s own support center, which runs at help.yazsis.com. We define the scope of an installation adapted to your organization together with you after a needs analysis. You can explore the ticket, SLA and customer panel screens on the YazSis CRM AI page.