Service Level Agreements

 

Service Level Agreements (SLA) help evaluating the efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness of your support team. You can configure SLAs for each Support Plan and based on the services offered, the response and resolution time can be set accordingly.

 

 

Scenario

Your organization is providing service contract ( Gold Support Plan ) to Acme Inc, and you have configured Service Level Agreement (say SLA 1) with Gold Support Plan such that the requests should be responded within 4 hours and resolved within 8 hours. Now any requests raised for Acme Inc follows SLA 1 and the due by time is set accordingly.

 

 

To access Service Level Agreement configuration page,

1. Click on the Admin tab in the header pane to open the configuration wizard page.

2. Click on Service Level Agreement icon under the Main Settings block. The Service Level Agreements list view page opens. From this page, you can Add, Edit, Delete and Organize Service Level Agreements.

 

Add Service Level Agreement

Clicking on the Add New SLA link takes you to the SLA form. The SLA form consists of two blocks - SLA Details and SLA Rules.

 

SLA Details

1. Enter a unique name to identify the SLA in SLA Name field.  

2. You can also provide a brief Description for the SLA.

3. Select the Support Plan from the drop down for which the service level agreement should be applied.

 

SLA Rules - SLA is applied to requests matching certain criteria

 

Say, you want all the requests with Priority as 'High' OR Category as 'Replacement Queries' to be responded within 4 hours and resolved within 8 hours.

1. Select the Criteria from the drop down.

2. Click Choose button to choose the values from the database for that particular parent criteria. Choose the values and click Ok.  
   
   If you have selected the criteria as Priority then select the value 'High' from list of priority by clicking Choose button. If you want to select multiple values press Shift or Ctrl key. The selected values appear in the text field beside the choose button.

3. Click Add to Rules button to add the defined rule to the rule set. You can add another criteria for 'Category' in the same manner as explained above.

4. Select Match ANY of the following (OR) radio button if you do not want all the criteria to be checked before applying the SLA. By default, the radio button Match ALL of the following (AND) is selected.

 

5. Set the Response Time and Resolution Time in terms of Days, Hours and Minutes.
   
   Response Time denotes the time within which the support rep should respond to the request. Automated emails generated from the system will not be considered as a response. Resolution Time or due by time denotes the time within which the resolution is provided to a request and the status is set to Resolved.

6. You also have an option to resolve requests irrespective of the operational hours and holidays by enabling Should be resolved irrespective of Operational Hours.
   
   By selecting this option, you will be overriding the operational hours of your organization and the due by time is calculated from the creation time without taking into consideration the holidays and operational hours.

7. If the request is not responded within the specified Response Time, you can set escalation levels for notification to higher level support reps. To escalate requests when the response time elapses,

   1. Click Enable Level 1 Escalation.

   2. Choose the support rep to whom the ticket needs to be escalated by clicking Choose button.

   3. You can specify the actions to be carried out while performing the escalation from Choose Action drop down.

   4. Set the Date and Time, Before or After the escalation.

8. Similarly, if the request is not resolved within the specified Resolution Time, you can set up to 4 levels of escalation to support reps.  

9. Save the details.

By default, the SLAs escalations are enabled. You can disable the SLA escalations by selecting Disable Escalation button from the SLA list view page.

 

 

Edit Service Level Agreement

1. From the SLA list view page, click the Edit iconbeside the SLA Name to be edited.

2. The Edit SLA form opens with the values populated while adding the SLA.

3. Modify the details and Save the changes.  

 

Delete Service Level Agreement

1. In the SLA list view page, click the Delete iconbeside the SLA Name you wish to delete. A confirmation dialog is opened.

2. Click Ok to proceed with the deletion. The SLA is deleted from the SLA list.

 

Organize Service Level Agreements

 

You can decide the order in which the SLA should be applied on the incoming request by Organizing Service Level Agreement. With this option you can also organize the SLA to appear in the list view by following the steps below,

1. In the SLA list view page, click Organize SLA link. A pop-up window is opened with the list of available SLAs in the order that is appearing in the list view.

2. Select an SLA, and click Move up or Move Down button beside the list.

3. Click Save.