Horrible SLA Problems

[Emma]

I would really appreciate some help on this because I have been fiddling with it for HOURS and I am convinced it doesn't work as intended!

Why is it, when I set a specific user to have a specific SLA, if I modify that ticket's department, status or priority it switches to another SLA? There seems to be no logic to it. Why didn't it stick to the SLA I set for the user?

I can see that is using some kind of 'inner logic' to decide on an SLA based on the ticket priority/department/status, but what if I have SLAs like this:

4 hour - all departments - all status - all priority
2 hour - all departments - all status - all priority
1 hour - all departments - all status - all priority

Kayako seems to decide to pick one of these at random because I haven't got a specific unique SLA for each caregory type?? Madness!

This means I would have to create about 50 SLA combinations for evey single possible status type and priority, and also departments. I would gladly do this to get it working, however it is impossible for me to do this.

If I have departments such as sales, accounts, support, with status types of new, open, closed, and priorities of low, medium and high, tell me how am I meant to design this in such a way that my types of customer will get the correct SLA 'automatically'. Every department NEEDS to be able to use all the status types and all the priority types. Surely I don't have to create types such as 'sales-open-high' ? This would be a nightmare for my staff to use.

So if kayako is going to choose a random SLA if I have more than one using the 'all' options, then what exactly is the point of having these 'all' options? I seem to hae no control over it. I thought I had it finally covered when I realised I can set an SLA per user, but this only works on initial ticket creation - any ticket changes and it chooses another SLA at random.

I am desperate for help on this, I have tried everything I can think of. If anyone at all can help me, give me a hint, please, please do! It has driven me to distraction. I have logged a support ticket but they give very short replies which in no way relate to the question I am asking :/


Emma

Edit: Failing any assistance with this, can anyone give me an example of the SLAs they have setup and what kind of departments/status types/priorities they have? I want to see where I am going wrong, and I would like to know how other people use this system.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Emma

I am currently moble so I am not in the best position to fully respond to your query right now, but I am sure others have input in the meantime.

Could you also post your ticket ID so that I can look into why your ticket was no responded to properly.

[Emma]

Thanks Jamie, hope someone can shed some light on this. I've been pulling my hair out :-)

Ticket ID JBD-416096 - I kept it simple and only asked about why the SLA was changed.

[richm]

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"

I feel you pain. I've yet to sort out how all the SLA functionality can be used to best advantage. The best I've ever gotten out of it is to have sla's based on ticket priority. I don't even mess with the assign specific SLA stuff as I could never sort it out.

Post #5 (from me) In the thread below has a screenshot that shows how I set it up.

Several SLA and automated escalations?

Best of luck!

If you can figure out what best practices for using the SLA piece is, please share.

HTH,

Rich

[Emma]

Originally Posted by richm

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"

Hah! This is precisely how I feel. The more I read in the forum the more I realise people simply are not using the SLA feature in anything but the basic way.

I'm convinced that not having an SLA stick on a per-customer basis is a bug, but would just like to get an opinion before I submit a bug report, or a confirmation from anyone who has had the same trouble.

It's a bit of a disaster really, as we can't use the system until this is resolved. We bought it for the entire purpose of having highly configurable SLAs...

If any developer can advise of any source code I can tweak that will turn off the automatic SLA features, so that the per-user SLAs will stick permanenetly, this would solve all my problems temporarily. We have the owned version.

Many thanks!

Emma

[craigbrass]

You'd be best submitting a ticket (http://support.kayako.com) and explaining the issue there and linking to this thread to get your issue looked into quickly.

[Emma]

I've got a ticket on there and they are looking at it. I just wondered if any users had the same problems so I could be sure I wasn't going mad

[craigbrass]

Oh yes, didn't read the bit further up!

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Emma,

Can you give me your ticket ID?

[Emma]

Ticket ID JBD-416096

[craigbrass]

You missed it too Jamie, she mentioned the ticket id earlier on in the thread. Tis one of those days!

[Emma]

I forgive you because it is Monday

[Emma]

Well, not good. They managed to replicate the problem I have but the response was:

Hi,

I checked that you have same criteria set for all SLA plans. Please do not assign the same criteria to all SLA plans otherwise they will conflict with each other.


Thanks.

Regards,

Vipan Balrai

--

I really need someone to explain how SLAs work if this is the case. Does it mean I can only ever have SLAs that are set by the priority type? It basically tells me the other options in SLAs are redundant. And they won't stick an SLA to a customer. Awful. I think kayako will be useless to us in this case :/

[Brendan.main]

Hello, we are a hosting company and are having the same issues with kayako and are moving away from kayako and probably going to use manageengine. There is no flexibility in kayako and not enough options with the sla. The sla is not setup good enough.

Cheers

[craigbrass]

Hopefully it will be improved in V4. I suggest you post in feature requests how you would like it to work so the developers notice it.