Support

Do you mean like what the Auto-replies feature already does, or something different?

So, let me see if I get this right.

Alice is the Client. Bob is the support staff.

Alice submits a ticket. Alice, via an as yet unspecified method, chooses that she wishes the ticket to be responded within 5 days.

If Bob submits a reply, no further action is taken.

If Bob does NOT submit a reply at all within 5 calendar days a notification is sent.

If Bob submits a reply, Alice follows up, but Bob does not respond for another 7 days NO NOTIFICATION is sent.

Does that sound about right?

I'm afraid that the feature you are looking for is inherently incompatible with the majority of features we have in ATS, and does not fit a mass-distributed helpdesk component like ours to begin with.

I understand that in your head it looks really simple. "Every post has a drop-down, if there's no reply after this many days an email is sent out".

Who defines the contents of the drop-down? Are they per category?

What constitutes a reply? A post from any manager, the assigned manager, an invited user on the client's side, or a non-manager user with post permissions on the ticket? Who defines those rules? Are these rules per category, or per ticket? How do you make an interface for them that does not require a PhD in Mathematics to understand?

Who gets notified? Would that be the same rules as the open ticket email, or different? Things can get really complicated when you take into consideration that there may or may not be an assigned manager, there are invited users, and there are users with read and post permissions per category. If you go by permissions, a public ticket would have to email all users on the site, which sounds wrong. Who defines those rules? Are they per category? And, again, how do you make an interface which even remotely makes sense?

What happens if a ticket is misfiled in a wrong category? How does the system respond to a category move?

What happens if a post is edited? What happens if a post is edited after a notification has been sent out, but the new deadline is into the future? What happens if a post is edited and the new deadline is now into the past? Should we allow it?

How do you process all these alerts without the entire system being dog slow?

These are just the obvious problems I can see. There is no good generic answer to them, which is a necessity for implementing something like that in a mass-distributed software. The only viable way to do this is to develop your bespoke helpdesk component, with rigid rules. The downside to that is that any change in the rules costs a lot (thing thousands of pounds) to change, and there's massive development inertia since this "simple" feature actually touches every single aspect of the helpdesk.

This is why I will have to say no to it. I'm sorry.