Automated ticket follow up within business hours

[JP Woodbridge]

I have multiple "prompt customer for comment" automation tasks setup so that a customer is prompted to reply if the ticket is in a 'waiting on customer' state for 3,6 & 9 days, before a final task cancels the ticket.

How can I set these up to ensure that they only run within business hours predefined in the SLA calendar hours?

I know I can setup a new SLA and resolve the ticket on breach of that SLA, however this does not help with sending reminders to users to respond to their ticket. 

Can this be done with JQL, even if business hours are set manually within each JQL statement?

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @JP Woodbridge an welcome to the Community,

I would assume that you have set up your SLA in such a way that your SLA timer gets paused when a ticket enters the Waiting for Customer status. So you can best uses history search in JQL to trigger your automation.

On top of that, we have sometimes introduced a custom field to track if we have already sent a reminder. In this case, as you plan to send 3 reminders, you could use a field that counts the number of reminders.

With that in mind, you could do something like this to trigger the rule for the first time:

Status = "Waiting for Customer" AND Status CHANGED TO "Waiting for Customer" BEFORE StartOfDay(-3d) AND "Reminders Sent" IS EMPTY

(Reminders Sent would be the custom field I mentioned above)

As you run the rule, do send out the notification, but also update the value of the custom field to 1, 2, ...

For your second reminder, you could then use:

Status = "Waiting for Customer" AND Status CHANGED TO "Waiting for Customer" BEFORE StartOfDay(-6d) AND "Reminders Sent" = 1

On a side note and as an alternative, you could also use a different approach and just automatically close the ticket earlier on. As long as you still leave the possibility for the customer to reopen, that approach may reduce complexity.

Hope this helps!

[JP Woodbridge]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout 

This is brilliant and will work perfectly, thank you!

I'll add another automation so that when a customer does reply and status is changed back to Waiting for Support, the Reminders Sent value will reset to 0

[Leonard Krygsman]

This is fantastic and I'd like to use it as well.

My only question is: does this take business days into account? Looking at the JQL reference guide, it looks like the startofday() function might be calendar days, not necessarily business days.

Is it business days?

Thank you!

[allen.gaudinier]

@JP Woodbridge 

Do you mind sharing exactly what you did to get this setup?

I'd love to replicate this for our environment.

Thanks!

[JP Woodbridge]

Hi @allen.gaudinier 

I'd love to share exactly what I did, but our Jira has been down over a week... In the end i went with something slightly different as business days were never taken into account and it was becoming very messy with multiple SLAs for every ticket.

Essentially I created a field called 'user notification stage' (UNS) with a default setting of 0. I then had multiple automation rules triggered for a 3 day time frame:

 - Rule 1: If in "waiting on customer" status, no update for 3 days and UNS = 0, send email to user, set UNS to 1

 - Rule 2: If in "waiting on customer" status, no update for 3 days and UNS = 1, send email to user, set UNS to 2

 - Rule 3: If in "waiting on customer" status, no update for 3 days and UNS = 2, send email to user, set UNS to 3

 - Rule 4: If in "waiting on customer" status, no update for 3 days and UNS = 3, send email to user, set UNS to 0 and cancel ticket.

I call it the "Jira Solution" - It's far from perfect but it works. 

[allen.gaudinier]

Thanks @JP Woodbridge 

I just came across this thread as well which has a good solution.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Migration-Program/Jira-Service-Desk-Automation-Waiting-on-Customer/qaq-p/1827366