Nothing should sit in the queue unnoticed. The desk watches for that in three ways.
Slack escalation:
- Paste an incoming webhook URL into Integrations, Slack Escalation.
- Set Slack Alert Sentiment Threshold in Settings, Automation. The options are neutral and above, confused and above, frustrated and above, or angry, which is the default.
- As soon as triage classifies a ticket at or above that level, a message is posted to your channel with the sentiment, the subject and a direct link to the ticket in wp-admin.
Sentiment is ranked happy, neutral, confused, frustrated, angry, so lowering the threshold widens the net. With no webhook saved, no Slack message is sent. An upset ticket still emails you whether or not Slack is set up, so the alert reaches you even before you have a Slack channel. Settings, Email lets you switch that email off, or add other people to it.
SLA monitoring:
An hourly job checks two deadlines, both set in Settings, Automation.
- First reply within, 24 hours by default. It finds open tickets older than that with no non-private outgoing message at all.
- Resolved within, 72 hours by default. It finds tickets still open past that age.
Only your time counts. A ticket waiting on the customer is never late, and every stretch it spent waiting on them comes off its clock, so the email only ever lists tickets where it is your turn.
Each breach is emailed as a digest to your Support Admin Email, listing the reference and subject of every newly breached ticket with a link to the inbox. Setting either value to zero switches that check off. A late ticket is one of the alerts you can switch on or off under Settings, Email.
Why your inbox will not fill up:
Once a ticket has been reported for a given breach it is flagged, so the next hourly run skips it. You get told once per ticket per deadline. The flag is written without touching the ticket's updated time, so breached tickets are not shuffled to the top of your inbox as a side effect.
When a customer goes quiet:
You replied and they never came back. After 7 days of silence the ticket is marked Solved by itself, with a private note saying why. Change the number of days, or set it to 0 to switch this off, under Settings, Automation, When a customer goes quiet. Nothing is sent to the customer. If they write back, by email or from their support page, the ticket reopens by itself and comes back to you. Only tickets that began on this desk are touched: tickets brought in from another helpdesk are left exactly as they arrived.