Deliver consistent service with SLAs

A service-level agreement, or SLA, is an agreed-upon measure of the response times that your support team delivers to your customers, users, or audience. Using SLAs help you make sure you’re delivering measured and predictable service.

You define your SLA targets and we'll let you know when conversations fail to meet those targets. This way you can promptly identify and address problems.

Before you begin

To turn on SLAs, you’ll need to make sure you’ve configured the following settings:

• Business hours - The scheduled hours that agents are available. These times are used to calculate SLAs. For example, say you set your business hours as Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM and your First Response Time SLA is 30 minutes. If you receive a message on Friday at 4:45 PM, you breach the SLA Monday at 9:16 AM. Learn how to set up your business hours.

  Note: The SLA counter in Inbox displays total calendar time until the breach, including non-business hours.

• Prioritization - Move certain conversations higher up in the queue. For example, if you set an SLA for 60 minutes for public channel response times and 30 minutes for direct messaging ones, you may want to prioritize direct messages so your agents know to get to those right away. Learn how to prioritize conversations.

Add an SLA policy

Set up and configure a new SLA.

1. Go to Inbox, select Settings, and then select Admin settings.
2. Expand Queue, select SLA policies, and then select Add SLA.

Configure your SLA settings

The following settings are available when adding an SLA:

• Name - This name appears in SLA reports, so make sure it’s recognizable.
• Mark conversation Breached - The maximum time contacts should have to wait for a reply.
  • First response time - The longest a contact should wait before the initial response from an agent. For example, if you enter 10 minutes, the conversation is breached if it is unanswered after 10 minutes.
  • Conversation response time - The longest a contact should wait for additional responses.
• Mark conversation Urgent - Set the maximum time the contact should wait before a reply, as a percentage of the first response time. For example, if your first response time is 30 minutes, you can mark conversations as urgent after 15 minutes by entering 50%.
• Release ownership (optional) - Automatically release ownership when the default owner agent fails to reply after a specified amount of time, so that another agent can take over. Entered as a percentage of the first response time.
• Intermediate feedback - Send automatic messages to contacts with Urgent or Breached conversations to let them know they have your attention, but it's taking longer than expected to respond.
• Enable for channels - Apply the SLA policy to one or more channels and select your conversation types.

Get notified when an SLA is breached

Receive alerts via email and within Inbox about breached SLAs.

1. Go to Personal preferences, and then select Notifications.
2. Select or clear the check box under SLA. If you select the SLA check box, you can enter the number of breaches required to trigger a notification.
   • A conversation that’s been in the New queue for a certain amount of time displays an orange icon.
   • For breached SLAs, an alert appears and displays how long ago the breach occurred.

You'll find new notifications in the Hootsuite notification center (in Hootsuite, select Notifications - you may have to expand the options on the left to find it). An indicator appears when there's a new notification.