SLA Best PracticesUpdated 8 months ago
SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a formalized internal policy/agreement that outlines the expected level of service provided to customers. It specifies the performance standards and service commitments that the teams must meet. These agreements are critical for managing customer expectations and ensuring high customer satisfaction.
However, it's important to keep realistic goals that your team can achieve to keep the work ethic at a high level. This is why it's recommended to evaluate your volume vs. team members, communicate expectations to your customers (especially if you're a small team), and constantly review them as your business changes.
How to start with SLA?
1. Check the current FRT and RT per channel and set SLA policies to be similar to those values
2. Define the scope of service to explain the expected performance
3. Establish a clear escalation process
4. Prioritize categories covered by SLA
5. Specify incentives and penalties
6. Create an internal document and share it with agents
Manage breached SLAs
Review the report weekly to analyze the most commonly breached policy. Try to detect patterns in higher breach percentages (certain time of the week, month, year) and see how it correlates to your ticket volume and staffing.
You can also see the list of tickets that didn't meet SLA, and even download it, by clicking on the number of the Tickets with breached SLAs metric. It's recommended to examine those tickets to understand why your agent missed the target. It might be due to a gap in the process, or a lack of knowledge.
If a small number of agents miss the target, this indicates that they might need to be retrained. If most tickets breach the SLA, you might want to increase the threshold first to allow your agents to get back on track and progressively lower the threshold to the desired state once the conditions are improved (refined procedures, retrained agents, better staffing).