A Service Level Agreement, or SLA, is a policy you define that specifies and measures the response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customers. On Enterprise plans, you can create group SLAs, which are separate agreements between your internal teams.
You can use SLA and group SLA information in views, automations, and reporting to help prioritize the tickets you address and gather insight into team performance.
Adding SLAs to views
Similar to ticket statuses, SLA targets have different statuses on a ticket. Agents can see these statuses in tickets or in views in the SLA or Group SLA columns. These columns display the calendar time left before the next target on any given ticket will be breached.
For details about the different SLA statuses and how the target statuses appear in these columns, see Viewing and understanding SLA targets.
Currently, there's no way to send notifications to agents based on SLA breaches.
To add SLAs and group SLAs to a view
- Click the Views icon (
) in the sidebar, then select a view. - Click the Actions menu, then select Edit view.
- In the Formatting options section, click Add column.
- Select SLA or Group SLA from the list.
- To make sure the tickets whose targets are most breached or are closest to breaching
will get attention first, select Order by > SLA or Group SLA in
Ascending order.
- Click Save.
The column is added and you can now filter your view by SLA or group SLA (see Filtering tickets in a view to refine results).
Using SLA breaches in automations
You can set up automations based on SLA breach status using two conditions: Hours since last SLA breach and Hours until next SLA breach.
On Enterprise plans, you can set up automations based on group SLA breach statusus using the conditions: Hours since last Group SLA breach and Hours until next SLA breach.
For information about creating automations, see Creating and managing automations for time-based events.
Currently, you can't create triggers based on SLA or group SLA breach status.
Reporting on SLAs
You can view how well you are meeting your SLA policies with the SLA reporting dashboard. On Enterprise plans, you can view how well you are meeting your group SLAs on the Group SLA dashboard. These dashboards give you relevant information for each SLA metric you measure. The reports enable you to pinpoint areas where you might need to increase efficiency or staffing based on weekly and hourly information.
You can either build new custom SLA reports (see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support and Explore recipe: Reviewing SLA performance), or use the pre-built reporting dashboard (see Analyzing your Support ticket activity and agent performance).
It is important to note that the pre-built reports are based on a per instance basis rather than a per ticket basis. Most of your SLA metrics (First Reply Time, Requester Wait Time, Agent Work Time) and the group SLA metric (Ownership time) are measured once per ticket. However, the metrics Next Reply Time and Periodic Update Time are used to measure the amount of time between comments. So, these metrics could potentially be calculated multiple times.
For example, suppose you answered your customers' comments within the target time once, but breached the target three times after. Each of those achievements and breaches are calculated as separate instances.
Now how would this work if you are trying to calculate your Next Reply Time achieved percentage?
- Ticket A: 1 breach, 3 achievements (4 instances)
- Ticket B: 1 breach, 5 achievements (6 instances)
- Ticket C: 0 breaches, 3 achievements (3 instances)
- Ticket D: 3 breaches, 1 achievement (4 instances)
- Ticket E: 0 breaches, 3 achievements (3 instances)
Overall, there are 20 instances of Next Reply Time measured across five tickets. Your % Achieved is calculated by taking the number of achieved instances over the total number of instances. In this case your achieved percentage would be 75%.
% Achievement=15 achieved instances/20 measured instances=75%
The SLA metric instance attribute is also important when you build your own custom reports. If you want to view individual instances, you need to slice your report by this attribute. You can find this attribute underneath How>Ticket SLAs.