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SLA Alerts

Last Update: Sep 2024 • Est. Read Time: 3 MIN
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Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used to measure conversation metrics and ensure that you're providing consistent support to your customers. SLA alerts are a way for you to send in-app notifications to select users and/or teams to notify them of any conversations that are at risk of breaching their SLA policy metric(s). 

Once a user receives a notification, they can click on it to view a search with the at-risk conversations and re-prioritize their workload in order to satisfy the SLA policies This way you can be sure that your customers are getting the responses they need when they contact you. 

Who can access this feature?
User typesAdmins can access SLA settings.


In this article

Setting up your SLA alerts

Once you create an SLA policy, you can create alerts that notify you of any metric within a policy that is close to breaching. Each policy can have up to 5 alerts. You must set at least one metric in a policy to create an SLA alert.

  1. Go to Settings> Workspace > Service Level Agreements.
  2. Create a new policy by selecting Add SLA or open an existing policy.
  3. Select Add SLA Alert and enter a name for the alert.
  4. Select the metric you want to create an alert for from the drop-down menu. You can only create alerts for metrics that have been defined in the policy. If you select Any Metric, you will be notified of the first metric in the policy that is close to breaching. Once the first metric is either breached or satisfied, you'll receive another alert if a different metric in the policy is about to breach.

    Note: You need to take an action on the conversation for the first metric that you were alerted to in order for you to get notified of any future breaches. For example, let's say your policy is set up with a First Response Time (FRT) of 10 minutes and a Total Conversation Open Time of 15 minutes and you're alerted to the fact that your FRT is about to breach, and then it actually does. You won't be alerted to the Total Conversation Open Time possibly breaching until you fulfill the first metric by sending an outbound message.

  5. Determine how often you want to check if the metric is about to breach. The minimum frequency that can be set is 5 minutes.
  6. Set how close the metric is to breaching. The minimum time allowed is 1 minute and the maximum is 7 days. 
  7. Select at least one individual user or team that gets notified with the alert. You can select a total of up to 50 users and/or teams.
  8. Select Save Changes.

Once a conversation is close to breaching, users will receive in-app notifications both via a toast notification and the Notificationsmenu.

Best practices for setting up alerts

When setting up your alerts, keep in mind that the goal is to catch any conversations that are at-risk of breaching while giving your team members enough time to take action on them. You should take your individual SLA time commitments into consideration when setting up alerts to ensure that you do not overwhelm your users with notifications. Below are basic guidelines that we recommend you follow when setting up your SLA alerts:

  • The Check Every interval will typically be less than the Breach in the next interval to ensure that the entire time defined for breaching is covered.
  • The Breach in the next interval will typically be higher than the time commitment you entered for your SLA metrics to ensure that all conversations that are close to breaching are caught. For example, if the SLA is set to 20 minutes, this value can be set to 30 minutes. You should try to structure the Breach in the next configuration of your SLA alerts so that your alert recipients have the time they need to take action.

For example, let's say you create an SLA policy for VIP customers contacting you specifically via email and you set the First Response Time for 10 minutes to ensure that they receive quick replies. You can set the Check Every internal to 5 minutes and the Breach in the next interval to 15 minutes. 

Using these intervals, your agents are notified of an upcoming breach with enough time to take action and respond to the customer before the countdown expires. Please note that intervals will vary based on your specific needs and these are just examples. Earlier, we gave an example of how to set up an alert for a policy with a 10 minute breach time. Let's say you have an SLA that is set for 5 hours, you may want to set the Breach in the next interval to 1 hour instead to avoid getting notified multiple times.