Set SLA policies in GorgiasUpdated a day ago

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) help you measure your support team’s performance by establishing time-based goals for the first response to and full resolution of a ticket. You can set a different SLA for each of your channels, and you can track your team’s adherence to your SLAs in the SLA Report.

Requirements

• Available on all Helpdesk plans, for each of your connected channels
• The account owner, admins and leads can set SLA policies

Establish SLAs for your channels

SLAs are internal agreements that outline the expected level of service your team provides to your customers. When introducing an SLA, be sure to communicate these policies to your team members, so they understand the service commitments and performance standards they’re expected to meet. A realistic, achievable SLA can positively impact a team’s work ethic, so it’s important to review them as your ticket volume fluctuates due to factors such as seasonality, staffing numbers, or other business-related changes.

In Gorgias, you can create SLAs to measure how many tickets achieve a first response time goal — the time between when a customer sends a message and your agent answers — and a resolution time goal — the time from when the first message is received to when the ticket is closed.

As a starting point, review your existing first response time and resolution time metrics, and establish an SLA goal based on what your team is currently able to achieve. Determine how to meet or surpass your SLA with your internal processes and prioritizations, then communicate the expectations with your team. You might also consider establishing incentives and penalties for performance to help motivate your team.

Create SLAs

When you create an SLA in Gorgias, you can choose the channels it applies to. You might decide to create one SLA for all ticket types, or separate SLAs for each unique channel.

Once you enable the policy, new tickets in your helpdesk will be measured against it, and you can review how many tickets achieve or breach your SLA policy in the SLA Report. If you modify a policy, past tickets and SLA reports won’t be affected.

1. From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner.
2. Select Workflows.
3. In the menu, locate Tools then select SLAs.
4. Click Create SLA.
5. Give the SLA a descriptive name, then select the channel the SLA should apply to. You can make multiple selections from the dropdown menu if you’d like to apply the same SLA to more than one channel.
6. Click the toggles next to First Response time and Resolution time, then enter a time goal in seconds, minutes, hours, or days.
7. Click Save Changes.

Narrow SLAs with tag and ticket field conditions

After selecting a channel, you can optionally add conditions to target specific tickets within that channel, like tickets tagged VIP or tickets where a field like Priority is set to High. When an SLA policy includes conditions, a ticket must match the channel and every condition for it to apply, which allows you to create SLAs that apply a stricter response time for VIP-tagged tickets while maintaining a standard response time for other tickets from the same channel.

Since you can update the tags and fields on a ticket at any time, keep the following in mind about how SLA policies are applied:

• The SLA policy that measures a ticket’s first response time can change if the ticket’s tags or fields are updated before an agent sends the first reply. Once an agent sends the first reply, the applied policy won’t change, even if tags and ticket fields are updated again. The first-response timer always starts from when the ticket was created, and won’t reset if a new policy is applied.

• For SLA policies that measure only resolution-time, Gorgias will re-evaluate which policy applies to the ticket each time its tags and fields are updated, until the agent closes the ticket for the first time.

• You can see whether the applied SLA policy was updated in the ticket events.

You can choose up to five tags, five ticket fields, or a combination of both as conditions for each policy. A ticket can have more tags or field values than a policy requires and still match. For example, a ticket tagged both VIP and Return will match a policy that requires only the VIP tag. To add conditions to an SLA policy:

1. From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner.
2. Select Workflows.
3. In the menu, locate Tools then select SLAs.
4. Click Create SLA, or select an existing SLA from the list.
5. Under Channels, select at least one channel. The conditions selector will appear once a channel is chosen.
6. Click the dropdown menu under Conditions and select tags or ticket fields.
7. Click Save Changes.

When you have multiple active SLA policies, Gorgias applies them to your tickets in the order they are listed on the SLA page. If a ticket matches two policies, only the one ordered first in the list will apply. For this reason, it's crucial to order SLAs with conditions above broader, channel-only policies in the list. To change the order of your SLA polices, visit the SLAs page, then click the  six dots icon next to any SLA policy and drag it to a new location.

Create Voice SLAs

To account for the real-time nature of phone support interactions, Voice ticket metrics are distinct from other support channels, and your Voice ticket SLAs can’t be combined with other channels. When creating an SLA for a Voice ticket, you’ll define a percentage of calls that will be answered within a given time threshold — for example, 80% of calls are picked up within 2 minutes.

1. From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner.
2. Select Workflows.
3. In the menu, locate Tools then select SLAs.
4. Click Create SLA.
5. Give the SLA a descriptive name, then select Voice from the Channels dropdown menu.
6. Enter a target percentage and a time threshold.
7. Click Save Changes.

Pause SLAs outside of business hours

If your support team isn’t staffed around the clock, you might prefer to pause the SLA timer outside of business hours so that only the time that agents are online is counted towards the achievement rate. When this setting is enabled, SLA timers on open tickets will automatically pause outside of business hours and resume at the next start of business hours, and for tickets created outside of business hours, the timer will only begin at the start of business hours.

1. From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner.
2. Select Workflows.
3. In the menu, locate Tools then select SLAs.
4. Click Create SLA, or select an existing SLA from the list.
5. Click the toggle next to Pause SLA timer outside of business hours.
6. Click Save Changes.

Enable or disable SLAs

If your brand experiences seasonal changes in support volume, you might find it useful to create different SLAs to account for increases or decreases in volume. You can add multiple SLA policies to Gorgias, and enable or disable them based on the season.

1. From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner.
2. Select Workflows.
3. In the menu, locate Tools then select SLAs.
4. Click Create SLA, or select an existing SLA from the list.
5. Click the toggle next to Enable SLA.
6. Click Save Changes.

Monitoring SLAs

Once you’ve set your SLAs in Gorgias, we create an SLA report in your Gorgias statistics to help you track your team’s success rate. The SLA report displays a breakdown of tickets that achieved or breached the time goals laid out in your SLA policies. To ensure this report remains accurate, be sure to update your SLA policies if your goals change.

When configuring your SLA policies, keep in mind that only tickets that meet every condition defined in the policy will be marked as achieved in the report. This means that if your policy defines both a first response time goal and a resolution time goal, both goals will need to be met in order for the ticket to count as achieved. If a ticket receives a response before the first response time goal, but isn’t resolved before the resolution time goal, the ticket would be considered breached. You can create a policy with only one goal (for example, first response time only) if you want achievement to be based on that single metric. However, only one SLA policy is applied to each ticket, which means you can only measure one goal.

To better understand which tickets are breaching specific goals, you can download the tickets used in the achievement rate calculation.

Managing SLAs

Review your SLA report regularly to help you recognize patterns around when tickets are breaching your SLAs. For example, there might be certain times of day, week, month, or year where breaches are more common that you can attribute to ticket volume or staffing levels; or certain topics might take your agents longer to resolve.

While the aim is to achieve 100% adherence to your SLAs, it’s normal for some tickets to miss your goals. In general, benchmark achievement rates in customer service for first response time and resolution time are:

• Excellent: 95% - 100%
• Good: 90% - 95%
• Acceptable: 85% - 90%

If your SLA report regularly reports achievement rates that you consider unacceptable, consider increasing your thresholds to re-establish your baseline while you work to refine your processes, retrain your agents, and/or hire more agents. Then, gradually reduce the thresholds to your desired times to measure whether your process improvements have been effective.