Reasonable workflow for handling incidents?

[Robert Werner]

I'm new to JSD so forgive me if this question seems silly.

I work for a startup software company that will be supporting customers using our product in the near future.  I plan to construct a great knowledge base so customers can get answers on their own quickly.  However there will be times when incidents occur and they need to contact us through the customer portal I'm building.

As a starting point, I plan to have a Subject field, a Description field, and a hidden Priority field (set to "High").  I expect customers will fill out these fields with some information and submit it to us.  But I also expect that 90% of the time they won't provide enough information to help us solve the problem.  So almost always we will have to request more info from them.

Part of our standard SLA is "Time to First Response".  Another part of our SLA is "Time to Corrective Action".  There's also wording in our SLA that when we are waiting for them, the clock is stopped.  This seems pretty standard.

I'm thus confused by the default incident workflow that JSD provides: https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/incident-management-817562151.html  Note that there is no "Waiting for Customer" step in the process.  This seems very strange to me.  Why wouldn't this field be there?  Is it actually the case that SLAs are written without the aforementioned clock-stopping clause?  In other words, are companies actually prepared to let their own SLA be violated by a customer who takes forever to get back to them?  I'm strongly suspect this cannot be the case.

Once again, maybe I'm missing something because I'm so new to JSD, which is why I'm turning to the community to help me understand this noticeable absence in the default incident workflow.

Robert

[Saad Sarakbi · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert,

- I believe the best way to solve the problem that the customers don't provide enough information is to make some fields mandatory:

Project Settings -> Request types -> Edit field-> Required  (Yes/No)

- You don't need to stick to the standard workflow you can add the "Waiting for customer" your self to the flow:

Project Setting -> Workflows -> Edit. (that may help you https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/workflows-780868207.html)

- There is indeed away to stop the timer:

Project Setting -> SLA's -> Time to first response -> Pause on (here you can select the status you added to the flow "waiting for customer").

Regards,

Saad 

[Robert Werner]

Interesting feedback.  Thank you.

Today I'm going to delve into editing workflows.