How to define Customer comment SLA

Question

Hello,

I have a project in which want to set 2 SLAs.

The first is simple for first response on a ticket and is time based, using creation and exit criteria is entering status which does the job great.

The other is a bit more challenging to do:

I'm trying to have a SLA of 1 hour to assure the customer is getting an update every hour at the latest, for as long as the ticket is open (not done)

When selecting start counting time when comment: for customers, and finish counting when status entered is done, I see no SLA on my project queue.

I assume a comment in the "Reply to customer" will address any "customer" as I have no such field used at the moment.

Any help will be appreciated.

Alina Kurinna _SaaSJet_ · Answer

Hi @Ran Wronsky

If you're open to using a Marketplace add-on, I’d recommend trying SLA Time and Report for Jira (developed by our team at SaaSJet). It makes this kind of customer comment SLA setup much easier – no workarounds or missing logic.

How you can configure it in the app:

You want to track time between customer comments and ensure your team replies within 1 hour as long as the ticket is not resolved. Here’s how that can be set up:

SLA Goal Name: “Time to Next Customer Update”

Start Condition: When a comment from the customer is added(You can select comment → from Customer)

Pause Condition (optional): Ticket is waiting on internal input

Stop Condition: When an agent replies (comment from Assignee) or Status = Done

You can fully control whether the SLA triggers only on customer comments and define what counts as a reply (e.g., public comment from the support team).

Bonus: SLA Reports & Dashboards

Automatically track and visualize every case where the 1-hour rule was met or exceeded.

Use SLA performance charts like Met vs Exceeded or SLA Grid for detailed analysis.

Segment by teams, customers, ticket types, or time periods to improve service reliability.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to help! Just let me know.

Regards!

Valerie Knapp_dpp5c6 · Answer

Hi @Ran Wronsky , thanks for your question.

I had a look in the Automation library and I wondered if  some variation of this rule might work for you - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library#/rule/1357152/25938854

So here ^, you could have an SLA that is hopefully for a small number of issues called hourly update, and if the issue isn't updated with a customer comment within the hour, to be breached and to send a slack message to your team prompting them to reach out to the customer.

Would that work, do you think?

Jack Brickey · Answer

hi @Ran Wronsky , if I understand your end goal you want to notify the agent if they have not updated the customer within an hour. Is that a correct restatement of your goal? If so then I would not do this with an SLA, and in fact you cannot. Rather, II would use Automation.

* create a custom date field and name it as desired, e.g. “last customer comment”. 
* create an automation rule that triggers when a comment is made to an issue and add a condition that checks if the comment was public 
* if so the update the date field with now()
* create another rule that runs hourly with a condition to check if the "last customer comment" is <= {{now.minusHours(1)}}. if so an action would email assignee

this is just an idea that will need refinement and testing. i think you will also want to have conditions where the status is not waiting for customer possibly. or you need to consider certain transitions as being notifications to customer.