There are several ways to track which Tickets are most important in the helpdesk.

SLAs

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are targets set up by your Admins for how soon you should reply to or resolve a Ticket.

They may reflect your company’s own service standards, or contractual obligations your company has to your Users.

A simple example is an SLA which states you will send the first reply to each Ticket within 4 hours.

The way SLAs track waiting time can be more complex: for example, you can have an SLA that states a User shouldn’t spend more than 12 hours total waiting time during your helpdesk working hours before their Ticket is resolved.

An SLA may apply to all Tickets, or only to certain categories of Tickets. For example, if some organizations pay you for premium support, your helpdesk could have an SLA that applied only to Tickets from those organizations. Some SLAs can be assigned by Agents manually.

An SLA also has a warning time which specifies when you will be warned that the Ticket is close to failing.

Viewing SLA Statuses

Ticket Queues

You can see the SLAs for Tickets in your queues by enabling the toggle for SLAs in the queue filtering:

This will show 4 different numbers in association with the queue, where:

• Yellow - Passing

• Orange - Warning

• Red - Failing

If you click on one of the SLA counts it will load up the Tickets with that specific SLA status in the view panel.

You can read more about queue options in our queue settings section.

On the Ticket

If a Ticket has an SLA applied to it, it is also possible to see the SLA on the Ticket itself.

If you click on the SLAs tab (timer icon) in the Ticket properties pane you can see the SLA data:

There are tabs for SLAs that are currently active and those that have been completed.

Urgency

Tickets can be assigned an urgency score from 1 to 10. This is a measure of how soon the Ticket needs attention.

You can set the urgency of a Ticket manually.

Your Admins may also have set up automatic processes to set the urgency - for example, your helpdesk may use escalations to automatically increase the urgency of a ticket that is taking a long time to be resolved.

Here’s an example of Tickets sorted by descending urgency in the view panel.

The urgency scores are displayed on the right. Low urgency scores are colored yellow, shading through orange to red as the score gets higher.

You can also watch a video walkthrough of Ticket Prioritization in Deskpro.