Finding a way to track/make sure issues are being regularly responded to

Question

Hi - I am looking for the best way to track our workflows and find a way to report on how well our team is doing when it comes to responding to tickets in a timely manner. Before, we have attempted to use SLA's to track this, but with current limitations, we cannot find a way to make this dynamic (where the SLA's would restart when satisfied/when another comment is made by an Assignee).

Currently, we are utilizing an automation and a custom field that sets a date and time to when the most recent comment is made by an Assignee for visibility purposes. This then utilizes our SLA which is satisfied when there is a response by the Assignee within 168 hours (7 days). In order to make this dynamic and reportable for us, we would like to explore other options of doing so.

What is the best approach for this?

Jackson Primmer · Answer

@Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ - Thanks for getting back to me! In our situation, we want to be dynamically tracking how well we are doing with responding to customers. Due to this, I thought we would use SLAs. I am using the following to calculate response within a week of the ticket being opened:

This shows limitations because as soon as we respond the first time within a week, the SLA is satisfied and does not update anymore. We want to find a way to make sure we are continuing to respond weekly. What would be ideal is if there were a way that the SLA could see when we respond and reset to be one week out. We could measure success based on unfulfilled SLA = Doing good vs breached = not being responsive. Do you have any advice or thoughts on this? Thanks

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Jackson Primmer

welcome to the community!

Just to add to @Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ great answer: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of so-called smart columns that aren’t natively available, including time since last comment, time since last response to customer, and many other comment-related columns.

This is how it looks in action:

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by your smart columns, and also use them across JXL's advanced features, such as support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

This all just works - so there's no automation or scripting whatsoever required.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ · Answer

Hi @Jackson Primmer

The best option is using SLA. Thanks to this you can easily check if your agents met these conditions or regularly breached SLAs. Also this information you can use in reports.

Talking about current limitations, does your company have 30 SLA configurations? Maybe it's better to think about consolidating some of them, modify SLA rules, redefine JQLs, etc.

In case of using automation, you have to also keep in mind about limitations in executing rules in the Standard plan.

Another option is looking for some apps on the Atlassian Marketplace which allows you to create endless list of SLAs. Definitely, it would be cheaper solution than moving to Premium plan.