Creating and Managing SLAs

About

A Service Level Agreement policy (SLA) allows Insightly System Administrators the ability to set performance standards for their support team. 

In this Article

• How do SLAs Work?
  • Plan Limits
  • Ticket Records
• Creating SLAs
• Managing SLAs
  • Reorder SLA Policies 
  • Add Reminder Actions
  • Add Escalation Actions

How do SLAs Work?

An SLA is an agreed upon timeframe (essentially targets or deadlines) for the response and resolution to tickets that are submitted to a support team; agents should regard SLAs as contracts between themselves and the customers they serve. Providing timely support and responses based on SLAs ensures that companies are delivering predictable and consistent quality customer service. SLAs also have the advantage of providing visibility to service administrators when problems arise or tickets fall outside the parameters of the SLA. 

Plan Limits

Ticket Records

A ticket's SLA policy is recorded in a ticket record's Details tab; users can also see how much SLA time is remaining before the next action is due. Once a ticket has the status of Closed or Solved, it will no longer display an assigned SLA policy. SLA functionality can differ based on the status of a ticket, for more information regarding SLAs and tickets, the Creating and Managing Tickets article can be reviewed.

Creating SLAs

System Administrators on Professional and Enterprise plans have the ability to create multiple SLA policies in addition to the Default SLA.

1. To create an SLA policy, navigate to System Settings > Automation > SLA Policies and click Add SLA Policy. 
   1. Enter the SLA policy details as applicable. The policy name is required to be unique and cannot share its name with an existing policy. 
   2. SLA criteria can be set up by clicking Add Filter Row. SLA criteria is used to define what conditions must be met in order for the SLA policy to be applied to a ticket. For example, if all tickets from a specific contact should have the same SLA policy applied to them, a filter row would be added to define the contact name. 
   3. Via the SLA Policy Targets section, the target timeframes of the policy can be configured; these targets are the agreements of the SLA that are required to be met to stay in compliance with the SLA. Each timeframe can be scheduled using hours and minutes. 
      1. All received tickets are automatically assigned the priority level of Normal unless automation has been setup via System Settings > Automation > Automations to assign a different priority level based on ticket criteria. 
      2. Via the Operational Hours drop-down, the policy targets can be defined as being business hours or calendar hours (this assignment works in conjunction with the business hours set up via System Settings > User Interface > Schedules).  
         • When SLAs are configured, the field Operational Hours can be set to business hours (rather than calendar hours) to allow SLAs to work in conjunction with the business hours set up by System Administrators via System Settings > User Interface > Schedules. This configuration will account for weekends and when Customer Service Agents are not actively working tickets to allow for SLAs to provide the most accurate time for when actions are due. 
      3. To allow escalation actions for the policy, enable the Escalation checkbox for each applicable priority level.
   4. Once all SLA details, criteria, and targets have been applied, click Save SLA Policy. The policy will now display in the list view of policies via System Settings > Automation > SLA Policies and will be applied to incoming tickets based on the set criteria/filters. 
      1. When saving an SLA policy, a warning may appear stating that it may cause some tickets to now be in SLA violation and some tickets will not generate new SLA notification emails.

Managing SLAs

Reorder SLA Policies 

SLAs are applied to tickets based on the order they appear in System Settings; the first matching policy to meeting the criteria will be applied. System Administrators on Professional and Enterprise plans have the ability to change the order of SLA policies, with the exception of the Default SLA policy which will always be present at the bottom of the SLA list.

The most restrictive SLA policies should be placed at the top of the list so that they are applied to a ticket before any less restrictive SLA policies. When any SLA is updated or reordered, Insightly will perform an evaluation to determine which SLA should apply to each ticket. If a ticket no longer meets the criteria of the SLA that was previously assigned, the SLA will be removed and the ticket will be reevaluated and an applicable SLA policy will be assigned to it. If no custom SLA policy's criteria matches for a ticket, the Default SLA will be applied. 

To reorder SLA policies, navigate to System Settings > Automation > SLA Policies and click and hold the Order option for an SLA to reorder it. 

Add Reminder Actions

System Administrators on Professional and Enterprise plans have the ability to edit preexisting email templates which can be sent automatically to remind agents (and their managers) to perform the required action for a ticket before the SLA policy has been breached. Preexisting email templates can be accessed and edited via System Settings > User Interface > Email Templates. 

1. To add a reminder action to an SLA policy, navigate to System Settings > Automation > SLA Policies and locate the SLA policy that requires the reminder. Click the SLA policy name to edit it or click the three dot menu for the SLA policy and select Edit This SLA Policy.
   1. Via the Edit SLA Policy screen, locate the SLA Policy Reminder Actions section and click the Actions dropdown where Send an Email can be selected. 
      1. Define when the reminder should trigger via the When drop-down.
      2. Utilize the Before drop-down to define the target field.
      3. Define who should receive the email via the Send Reminder Email To field (multiple users can be added to this field).
         • Example: A System Administrator wants an SLA reminder to be sent to the assigned agent 1 hour before the first reply time limit is reached per the assigned SLA for the ticket. The following would be applied and for this example, the First Time Reply SLA Reminder from System Settings > User Interface > Email Templates would be utilized:
           • When: 1 hour
           • Before: First Reply Time
           • Send Reminder Email To: Ticket Agent
             
      4. Once the reminder action fields have been setup appropriately, click Save Email to save and implement the reminder action for the SLA policy. 

Add Escalation Actions

System Administrators on Professional and Enterprise plans have the ability to edit preexisting email templates which can be sent automatically to escalate a ticket once the SLA policy has been breached. Preexisting email templates can be accessed and edited via System Settings > User Interface > Email Templates.  When adding an SLA escalation action, when applicable, a message will appear to indicate which SLA priorities the escalation will not apply to based on the SLA Policy Targets section of the SLA policy. 

1. To add an escalation action to an SLA policy, navigate to System Settings > Automation > SLA Policies and locate the SLA policy that requires the escalation. Click the SLA policy name to edit it or click the three dot menu for the SLA policy and select Edit This SLA Policy.
2. In order for an escalation to apply to an SLA policy, the Escalation checkbox is required to be enabled for the applicable priority level displayed in the SLA Policy Targets section. Priority levels that do not have an enabled Escalation checkbox will not receive escalation actions. In the example below, escalations actions are enabled for both Urgent and High priority SLA policy targets.
   
3. Via the Edit SLA Policy screen, locate the SLA Policy Escalations Actions section and click the Actionsdropdown. 
   1. Select Send an Email or Add New Webhook.
4. If you selected Send an Emailin step 3:
   1. Define when the action should trigger via the When dropdown.
   2. Use the Before dropdown to define the target field.
   3. Define who should receive the email via the Send Reminder Email To field (multiple users can be added to this field).
      1. Example: A System Administrator wants an SLA escalation to be sent to the assigned agent immediately once the assigned first time reply SLA for the ticket has been breached. The following would be applied and for this example, the First Time Reply SLA Reminder from System Settings > User Interface > Email Templates would be utilized:
         • When: Immediately
         • Before: First Reply Time
         • Send Reminder Email To: Ticket Agent
   4. Click Save Email.
5. If you selected Add New Webhookin step 3:
   1. Define when the action should trigger via the When dropdown.
   2. Use the After dropdown to define the target field.
   3. Enter a Webhook Name.
   4. Enter a Webhook Endpoint.
   5. Check the Active checkbox.
   6. Select a value from the Invocation Payload dropdown.
   7. Click Save Webhook.