Support and the Portal

SLA targets swept every five minutes, not totted up on report day — and a customer portal on the same database, included rather than an upgrade.

Tickets with queues, categories, priorities, multiple participants, public replies separated from internal notes, attachments, merging, and a full history.

SLAs that are measured, not displayed

An SLA rule per priority sets a response target and a resolution target, in minutes, optionally against business hours rather than the clock. A job runs every five minutes, marks response and resolution breaches on the ticket, and the dashboard reports compliance as a percentage.

The defaults are sensible and editable — critical at one hour to respond and four to resolve, low at a day and a week — and the same rule mechanism doubles as an incident-response clock when a severity is set on it, which is how the Certifications module gets its incident timing without a second implementation.

The portal

Customers get their own view: their tickets, a published knowledge base, and a CSAT survey on a tokenised link that needs no account.

The portal role is an allowlist. Staff pages are not hidden from portal users, they are unreachable — the policy names who may enter rather than who may not, so a page added tomorrow is closed to the portal by default rather than open by oversight.

Time on the ticket

Log time against a ticket, flag it billable, override the rate where the contract says something different, and read it back as a billing report. Support time stops being the work nobody invoices.

Knowledge base, twice

Internal articles for the team and published articles for the portal, from the same store — so the answer given to a customer is the answer the team is working from.