Service Level Agreement: The Key to Agent Productivity
Have you ever wondered why one support team gets back to you in no time and the other takes days before you hear back from them? The secret to getting back to customers quickly isn’t just typing faster or hiring more people, it’s about how you set up your workflow in your helpdesk. Let’s take an example of two different support teams here to understand it better.
Team A: The agents have to spend time on (manually) looking for the next important or urgent ticket in the queue. They dig through them based on the ticket description (which can be misleading at times) or maybe by the number of exclamation marks in the subject line. But because they have already opened the ticket to look through it, they start replying to it even though there might be another high priority ticket down the queue. Even if they don’t reply to it, they’ve wasted all that time reading through a ticket they aren’t dealing with. Soon, they realize that this manual sorting kills their time and productivity. And they then end up picking whatever is next in the queue.
Hmm, sounds painful. There must be a better way! Let’s look at Team B.
Team B: Every ticket that comes in is labeled and assigned a priority either manually or based on a specific automated workflow. This priority decides the First Reply Time SLA for that ticket. Agents don’t have to manually sift through the pile and figure out what needs their attention on priority. All they need to do is deal with the ticket in front of them, knowing that they are spending their time on the most important issue.
The reason why Team B is acing it is because they’re making use of SLA – Service Level Agreement. SLA is the standard time within which you get back to your customers on a particular kind of request. But SLAs aren’t just great for ensuring that customers get a quick response – it also makes your agents more efficient! Read on for five ways in which SLAs help maximize your agent productivity.
Using Views Keeps Things Organized
You don’t want your agents to manually keep an eye on the next ticket that’s about to become overdue, or as we say in business, breach its SLA. You can save their time by prioritizing the tickets for them automatically. Once you’ve prioritized them, you can put them into different Views so that your agents know which View is to be handled on priority.
For example, you can have a View to list tickets which are about to miss its SLA in the next two hours. This gives your agents enough time to focus on the tickets and finish them before they breach the SLA. Additionally, it ensures that they only need to focus on doing the actual work instead of sorting the tickets by their urgency.
As mentioned in this case study on American Institute of Physics, they used to struggle in managing 10 different mailboxes and to get back to customers within 48 hours before they started using Freshdesk to prioritize the critical inquiries over the others. In the end, it helped their team maintain the SLA targets above 90%.
Internal SLAs get Things Done
While SLAs are usually considered to be an agreement with external customers, we should not undermine its importance internally as well. Internal SLAs are also called OLAs (Operational Level Agreements.) They define the interdependent relationship between the teams to prevent bottlenecks and to make sure that the SLA is met.
Have you ever heard your support team complain that they spend a lot of time chasing other teams before they can share an update with the customer? If yes, internal SLAs (OLAs) can help to reduce back and forth updates between them. Setting them up can streamline the internal workflows.
Think of a scenario where the Support team has to wait on an update from the Sales or the Engineering team and there is an SLA in place. For example, a system admin might have an internal OLA for minor database updates that have been requested in a customer support ticket. Or your product team might have an OLA set for triaging bug reports. This helps both the teams in setting expectations and improving their productivity.
Setting Expectations Reduces Duplicate Work
If we take an example of Team A as mentioned above, they’re likely to get more duplicate tickets. The reason being, when customers don’t hear back from you on time they chase for an update, sometimes even using a different channel. This means your agents have to handle two tickets from the same customer even if it involves merging them and responding.
However, in the case of Team B, they’re already setting the correct expectation for the customer by letting them know the usual turnaround time and are also sticking to that turnaround time. It works in their favor.
As you can see you’re helping your agents save time and focus on the real work because they don’t have to keep sorting duplicate and follow up tickets from customers. At the same time, you’re reducing customer effort too by preventing channel switching from email to live chat, for example, when taking the follow-ups.
SLAs also set better expectations for your agents. They know how quickly they need to get back to each kind of ticket, so there’s no confusion or miscommunication about where to spend their time. Instead of wondering about whether they can leave that ticket in the queue for just a little longer, they can see right on the ticket how long they have before they miss any promises.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
The by-product of setting up SLAs is that along with improving agent productivity, it also helps you to measure certain metrics to make decisions for your support team. If your team is missing too many SLAs this could be an indicator that something is broken. Some of the things that it highlights are:
– It’s time to hire a new agent because your team is overburdened with the workload, and that is leading to breaching SLAs on the tickets.
– Your support team needs more training on the product because they are struggling to support the customers effectively.
– If it is particular kind of tickets that are missing the SLA, that might mean you need to fix the issue in the product itself to save your support team from extra workload and help them in saving time.
All this information can be extracted from the data you get from the SLA metrics. It can eventually help your agents deliver better service in less time.
Escalate Smoothly
You can set up automated workflows to escalate a ticket based on SLA. Tickets can be escalated by bumping up their priority manually or automatically when it misses the existing SLA applied on it. When tickets are escalated, you can choose whether to send an email notification to a team lead or anyone else that can jump in. Alternatively, you can just add the email to a higher priority view so that it gets eyes on it as soon as possible.
Pro Tip: You can also use Slack integrations to send Slack alerts for the tickets which just breached their SLA. This helps your team to avoid any further delays in replying to it.
Escalations can help grab attention and avoid further delay in getting back to the customer. Or if it is escalated by bumping up priority the team knows that someone senior or with expertise needs to jump in to help with the ticket. Once again, with these workflows in place, you can cut down the manual chase.
Save Time and Be More Efficient
You want to make sure that your agents spend time working on helping the customers and everything else is automated or streamlined to save them time. In support, the tasks can get repetitive and when that starts happening it’s time to automate things to save time and increase productivity for your agents. SLA is one of the ways to do that and contextual collaboration saves time and improves agent efficiency
