SLA tracker

A preview of how this template lays out — the boards, their custom workflow states, and where the sample issues land. WIP caps show a badge.

• P1: customer can't export their workspace

  P13pt

• P2: billing invoice discrepancy

  P22pt

• P3: how do I archive an old cycle?

  P31pt

These rules aren't created when you apply the template — they're recipes you can wire up in Settings → Automations once your board exists.

• When

  P1 ticket not acknowledged in 1 hour

  Then

  Escalate to the support lead and notify in #support

• When

  Ticket sits in 'Waiting' for 2 days

  Then

  Auto-nudge the customer and flag for follow-up

Waiting is the column that makes the numbers honest. Every support queue eventually argues about whether the clock should run while the team is blocked on a customer reply, and a board with no way to express 'blocked on them' resolves that argument by quietly inflating your resolution times until nobody trusts the metric. Acknowledged as a distinct state is the other half: response time and resolution time are different commitments with different targets, and a board that cannot tell them apart cannot report on either.

1. 1.Write the two clocks down, per priority, before anything else

   First response and resolution are separate targets, and each priority level needs its own number for both. Write them somewhere the team sees them daily. An SLA that lives in a contract nobody on the support team has read is not a commitment, it is a liability waiting for a quarterly business review.

2. 2.Set priority by impact, not by volume of complaint

   Define P1 through P3 in terms of what the customer cannot do — a blocked core workflow, a degraded one, a question — and hold that line when a large account calls a P3 a P1. Priority inflation is the failure mode that destroys a queue: once everything is P1, the escalation rules fire constantly and the team learns to ignore them.

3. 3.Make acknowledgement carry information

   Moving to Acknowledged should coincide with a reply that says what you understand the problem to be and when you will next update them. A templated 'we have received your ticket' technically satisfies a response SLA and satisfies no human being. The update commitment matters more than the initial reply, because unpredictable silence is what customers actually escalate about.

4. 4.Use Waiting honestly, and nudge out of it

   Waiting means the ball is genuinely in the customer's court, not that the ticket is hard. Parking a ticket there to protect a metric is the most common way support data becomes fiction. The two-day nudge exists so that Waiting does not become a graveyard — a ticket the customer has abandoned should be closed with a note, not left pausing your clock forever.

5. 5.Review Resolved history monthly, looking for causes

   The point of the history is not the average — it is the cluster. Ten tickets a month about the same confusing screen is a product finding, not a support workload, and it should leave the queue as a linked issue on a product board. A support team that only measures throughput will get faster at answering the same question forever.

This board encodes one opinion about how the work should run. Here is where that opinion is wrong and something else fits better.

• Your SLAs carry financial penalties. If a missed response window costs you money or triggers a service credit, you need a system that measures the clock automatically, pauses it by policy, and produces an auditable breach report. This board tracks states; it does not time them, and a hand-maintained approximation is not evidence.
• Customers need to email in or see a portal. There is no inbound email intake here and no customer-visible ticket view, so somebody is transcribing. That transcription step is where tickets get lost, and it scales badly past a handful a day.
• You need satisfaction measurement. CSAT surveys after resolution, and the trend behind them, are how support quality is actually assessed. Response speed with no quality signal optimises for closing tickets fast, which is not the same as helping people.
• You are running a multi-shift or multi-language desk. Routing by language, skill or timezone, and handing tickets across shifts, needs real assignment rules. A single board with one In progress column will not express it.

Honest comparisons, including where the other tool wins. Planoda is pre-launch, so nothing below is a benchmark — it is a description of how each product approaches this job.

• Zendesk

  The default answer for a reason: email and chat intake, customer-facing portal, macros, SLA policies with automatic clock handling including business hours, and satisfaction surveys. This template is the shape of a support queue without any of the automation that makes a real desk work.

  Where Zendesk is better: Automatic SLA timers with business-hours awareness and breach reporting are the entire point of a helpdesk, and this board has none of it. If you owe response times to anyone in writing, use a real helpdesk rather than a board.

• Jira Service Management

  Atlassian's desk gives you request types with per-type SLA calendars, a customer portal, queues by filter, and — its real advantage — a short path from a support ticket to a linked engineering issue in the same system, which is the handoff most desks are worst at.

  Where Jira Service Management is better: The support-to-engineering handoff is smoother there than anywhere else, because both live in the same issue graph. Escalating a ticket into a defect does not mean re-typing it into another tool.

• Intercom

  Intercom's strength is conversational support in the product itself, with the customer's account context, usage and history attached to the thread. For product support as opposed to IT ticketing, that context often resolves the ticket faster than any workflow.

  Where Intercom is better: For in-product messaging, customer context on the conversation, and deflection through help content, Intercom does things a board cannot approach. Support that happens where the customer already is beats support they have to go somewhere to request.