A Guide to Setting SLAs for Customer Support Teams

Determining the right amount of time to commit to for SLAs is a balancing act. As much as we might want to promise instant responses, it’s not a practical promise to make to customers. If we over-promise on response times and don’t deliver, customers will be disappointed and there might be serious contractual consequences such as fines, usage credits or early contract termination.

On the other hand, SLAs should help the customer feel assured that they will get timely responses if and when they need assistance. Set the goal post too far away and customers will be disappointed with slow responses. Instead, find a balance between over-promising but still meeting the needs of customers - often by personalizing SLA policies by customer segment. Here are six things to think about when designing your SLA team policies.

SLAs are promises that you make to your customers. If you’re a smaller company that doesn’t offer contracts or legally binding SLAs, your SLAs might be similar to the internal goals your customer support team sets for response and resolution times.

However, if you’ve outlined your SLAs in your terms of service or in a legal contract, there are serious repercussions for breaches. Your customer support team goals shouldn’t be to meet the bare minimum level of service. In this case, you’d want to set your goals much more ambitiously than simply avoiding SLA breaches.

Plus, setting your external SLAs the same as your internal goals doesn’t give you much room for error. Ideally, you should aim to resolve inquiries well within SLAs. SLAs should be the longest acceptable time for a customer to wait, but they shouldn’t be your measurement for quality.

The best practice is to set your customer support team response and resolution goals well below your SLAs so that you’re consistently working to exceed customer expectations.

When determining your SLA policy, it’s important to consider if all customers fall into the same bucket, or if some customers require unique policies. Understanding the needs of your customers based on their plan type, or contract requirements can help provide more personalized experiences. Two ways you can segment customer groups are:

Tiering customers by plan type

High value customers might get priority over a lower or free pricing plan. While it doesn’t always make sense to set an SLA for free users, setting SLAs for enterprise customers is expected, and often required in contract negotiations.

Personalizing SLAs for VIP customers

High value contracts will often require personalized SLA conditions. With multiple SLA policies, you can set a unique deadline for each customer and for each situation you might encounter.

While every customer concern is important, not all of them are equally urgent. By categorizing common support problems by priority and setting separate SLAs for each type of question, your team can better prioritize the needs of your customers. For example, an outage SLA time might be a lot shorter than a request to update a billing address. Using multiple SLA policies allow your team to get as granular as you’d like to serve each type of customer uniquely.

When setting SLA policies, take customer feedback into account. If customers are complaining about slow responses, or leaving negative customer satisfaction responses, it’s time to revisit your SLAs to ensure you’re meeting the needs of all your customers.

Understanding why customers need specific response times is important too. Critical software or products like banking apps or point-of-sale systems might require faster SLAs because any wait time will seem unbearable. Other products, like ecommerce or entertainment apps, might not require as quick of responses - meaning that you can dedicate resources to other priorities.

It might be tempting to optimize SLA policies based on agent availability - but this is the wrong approach to take. Instead, base your SLA policies on the customer experience as a first priority and then staff your team to meet those requirements. If you can’t meet your customer’s expectations and are experiencing SLA breaches, you’ll need to hire more agents to handle incoming inquiries.

Operational Level Agreements are critical to consistently meeting SLAs when there are internal dependencies to resolve an inquiry. As mentioned above, OLAs are agreements between internal teams that help prevent bottlenecks. When an SLA isn’t met, customers don’t care who’s fault it is - engineering, support or system administrators - they only care that their agreement wasn’t honored. OLAs help teams work together to meet their commitments to the customer.

If you don’t offer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it’s possible to set SLAs that only take into account your operating hours. For example, if you have a 24 hour Response Time SLA, but only have agents working during the weekdays, customers who send in an email Friday afternoon shouldn’t expect a response until Monday. Setting your SLAs to Business Hours instead of Calendar Hours will only keep the timer running while agents are scheduled to be working.

However, while using business hours might make your reporting look better, customers are still waiting over the entire weekend (or night) for a response. They might not care that you don’t have agents working - they only know that they aren’t getting help. If you choose to only report on business hour SLAs, it’s still important to keep in mind the customer experience for customers that live in different time zones or are trying to contact you after-hours.

How do Help Desks manage SLAs?

Once you’ve decided what your SLAs are and communicated them to customers, it’s critical to manage your time and track them correctly to make sure your team consistently meets their deadlines. Managing SLAs manually is almost impossible as it would require watching the clock on every customer contact at all times. It’s a much better plan to hand over the reins to a help desk to track, prioritize, automate and report on SLAs. Here’s how a help desk can help your team stay on top of your SLA obligations for a better customer experience:

Tracking

When you’ve set up SLA policies in Freshdesk, every incoming customer inquiry is assigned an SLA based on the customer type, product issue or whatever criteria you’ve developed. As the ticket waits for an agent to reply, the help desk keeps track of passing time automatically.

• View and act on imminent SLA breaches directly from the inbox
• Pause SLA counters when you’re waiting on a customer by using specific ticket statuses
• Keep deadlines top of mind by displaying elapsed time on each ticket’s SLA policy

Prioritization

Agents have a lot to think about when supporting customers. Which ticket they work on next shouldn’t be their biggest decision. When you use a help desk to manage SLAs, tickets are automatically routed to the best person and can be prioritized by how close they are to breaching their SLA - whether the reply SLA or resolution SLA.

• Work smarter, not harder by prioritizing the tickets that need a quicker response
• Take the guesswork of what to work on next away from agents to increase productivity
• Move beyond First in, First Out principles to prioritize tickets by urgency not just their place in line

Reminders

For agents that aren’t only responsible for working through the inbox, it’s easy to lose track of time and accidentally let a ticket breach an SLA deadline. Or maybe they didn’t even realize that a customer replied back or that a new ticket had been opened. This is where setting up SLA reminders can help. Help desks can automatically email team members a set amount of time before an SLA breach might occur. That way, someone can divert from their current task and jump in to make sure the customer gets the answer they need. Think of it as a little nudge in the right direction from your friendly help desk.

• Set up alerts and reminders to specific team members when SLA deadlines approach
• Notify the owner of a ticket, or other agents that action is needed
• Keep on top of incoming responses to not let anything slip through the cracks.

Escalation

When a ticket has breached it’s SLA, action is required immediately. A help desk can automatically escalate tickets and assign them to a superior for follow up and investigation into what happened. If that escalation doesn’t resolve the issue, tickets can be escalated up the management hierarchy to make sure that it’s taken care of.

• Create an escalation path so that customers get the resolution they need
• Automatically notify leads and managers of SLA breaches
• Show customers that you take SLA breaches seriously by escalating to a manager

Report

Understanding how often and when your team is missing SLA deadlines is critical to improving your customer experience. Use your help desk’s reporting feature to dive into breaches, uncover the reasons and trends behind them and to identify where gaps need to be closed. For example, if you see that most SLA breaches happen on Monday morning, it might be time to look into weekend support or increase the number of agents available first thing Monday. Some enterprise contracts will also require reports on SLA breaches as part of their contract, so ensure that your help desk can pull client specific SLA reports as well.

• Filter by ticket property to dig down into the root cause of excessive SLA breaches
• Discover what types of tickets are consistently overdue
• Identify common trends of when SLA breaches occur to update staffing needs