Does your helpdesk / service desk operate on 24x7x365, or does it work the more traditional 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday?

Perhaps 4pm on Friday? ;-)

If you do operate on "standard" office working hours of Monday to Friday, then no doubt you want your helpdesk tickets to be aged, and processed accordingly.  For example, if a ticket is logged at 4pm on a Friday, then by 9am on Monday it should be only 1 "business" hour old. 

Unfortunately, many helpdesk systems on the market today cannot make this calculation, instead showing the age of the ticket as 65 hours old!

Now that's going to blow your SLA real quick!

A powerful feature of HelpMaster is its ability to calculate the age of a job according to the "business hours" that you specify.  This not only includes the start and end time for each day of the week (Saturday and Sunday included), but also any holidays, public holidays and non-work days that you specify.  In other words, non-work days are ignored so that the true "working time" of the ticket is correctly calculated.

This is great news for SLA management, automation and escalation scenarios.  Here's some of the benefits and business implications.

1. Greater understanding of the actual age of a helpdesk job/ticket.  The actual time can be displayed in the field chooser, as well as on the actual ticket itself.
    
2. Build escalation rules around this time.  Escalation rules can be created to warn of an approaching SLA breaches, actaul breaches, as well as on-going notifications for persistent breaching.
    
3. Perform reporting based on this information.  Use the "Office time" as the basis for report filters.
    
4.  Having this data on-hand allows business to formalize a service level agreement contract with its clients/customers based on real time.

Stop the clock!

The logical extension to office-hours age calculations is to be able to "stop the clock" whenever a job/ticket is
placed into some kind of "on hold" status.  A typical scenario for this would be when a piece of equipment has been sent to a third party for repair, or waiting for parts.  In this instance, the ticket should be put into some sort of "on hold" status which would then stop the SLA clock from ticking.

We will be doing a lot more work around this concept in future versions of HelpMaster.  If you cannot wait until then, contact PRD Software and we'll show you how to do it right now, with whatever version of HelpMaster you're using!