How to configure Service Level Agreements (SLA) in Service Desk?

SLAs - Service Level Agreements, serve as guidelines for support teams to ensure that they meet specific targets and provide satisfactory customer support. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are essential and crucial in support services to ensure SLA goals are met by the support teams. SLAs typically include metrics, goals, and conditions that define the service standards and the consequences if those standards are not met. This knowledge base explains how to create a new SLA, configure metrics, define conditions, set notifications, and manage SLAs effectively.

Required Permission

Manage SLAs

• Only admins or agents with the above permission will be able to manage, create, edit or delete SLAs.

• The admins will be able to manage only the SLAs that are associated with the team(s) they are part of.

• This is a Team level permission.

Create New Service Level Agreement (SLA)

1. Navigate to Service Desk Main Menu > Automate > SLA

2. SLA for Incidents and Service Requests can be configured in the respective tabs displayed.

3. Click on + button or Create an SLA button

4. The Create SLA wizard screen will open up. The SLA management module within Service Desk enables you to define SLAs based on the below

4.1. Objective

• Choose the metric that you want to track and define your target goal. Service Desk offers five default SLA metrics which can used

  1. Time taken to send first response to a incident ticket
  2. Time taken to change a ticket from unassigned to assigned
  3. Time taken to respond to a requester response
  4. Time taken to add response to an existing last response by agent
  5. Time taken to reach ticket status

• You can define the time period in minutes/hours/days for the above SLA metrics

• Goal: The goal for the SLA metric can also be configured in terms of percentage(%) here. This will be useful in the SLA reports and analytics. 

4.2. Conditions

• Define the conditions that govern when the SLA should be evaluated.
• Attributes for defining the conditions will be available in the dropdown.
• For Match All, ALL of the conditions specified need to be TRUE to invoke an SLA.
• For Match Any, ANY ONE of the conditions specified need to be TRUE to invoke an SLA.

4.3. Email notification on SLA Breach

• You can enable Email notifications on SLA breach

• Customize and Compose the SLA Email Alert which will be sent when SLA breaches

4.4. SLA Title, Team Association, Excluded Statuses and other settings

• Enter Name and Description for the SLA

• Choose the Work Schedule to which it should be applicable.

  • Default Work schedule will be selected by default.

• Choose the Excluded Statuses if required.

  • This will pause the SLA timer when the Incident or the Service Request moves to the selected status(es)

• Choose the Team(s) to which it should be applicable.

  • The configured SLA will apply only to those Incidents or Service Requests to which it is associated.

  • Only Admins or Agents within the associated teams will be allowed to make changes to the configured SLAs based on the permissions

5. Display SLA Timer within Ticket Details

• Enable this setting to view the SLA timer in the Ticket Details page as a right panel 

6. Start SLA evaluation only when all applicable conditions are met

• Enable this setting to start SLA evaluation only when the configured conditions are met and not from the ticket created time.

7. Enable SLA

• Enable this setting to activate the SLA upon saving.

8. Click on Finish Creating an SLA to save and exit.

Edit or Update SLA 

1. In the Listing page, Click on the SLA to view or edit it.

2. A SLA Details right panel will open on the right side. This is a Preview panel.

3. Click on the Edit button at the top to edit the SLA.

4. Click on the Clone button to create a copy of a SLA.

5. Click on the Delete button to delete the SLA.