To Setup SLA, go to ADMIN -> SLA tab.

TeamSupport has the ability to define and various levels of SLAs and assign these to customers.  A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a negotiated agreement between two parties where one is the customer and the other is the service provider. This can be a legally binding formal or informal "contract".  The SLA records a common understanding about services, priorities, responsibilities, guarantees, and warranties. The SLA may specify the levels of availability, serviceability, performance, operation, or other attributes of the service.

 

Another way of thinking of an SLA is a warning system to make sure that tickets are dealt with in a timely manner and none are forgotten or go "stale". 

 

Triggers, Notifications & Warnings

 

SLAs are implemented in TeamSupport by creating a SLA Level.  These levels (think "Gold", "Silver", etc) define the maximum amount of time that can pass before being in violation of the contracted SLA.  We can define the SLA based on the following criteria:

 

1. The time since initial response:  This defines how quickly you must take the first action on a ticket - Typically this is something as simple as an acknowledgment that the ticket has been received.

 

2. Time since last action:  This defines the amount of time which can pass without any work being done on the ticket.  In many cases, SLAs are defined for certain severities such that "continuous work" must be performed until resolution.  In this case, a new action would have to be added to the ticket as the team worked to resolve the issue.  You can also use this to highlight stale tickets by setting this value to a few weeks.

 

3. Time until closed:  Perhaps the most important metric that the customer cares about - How long do they have to wait until the issue has been resolved.

 

The SLA is defined against each severity so that a "Critical" ticket severity has a different, and more stringent SLA than a "Minor" ticket.  In addition, SLAs are tied to each ticket type so that you can define different SLAs for "Incidents" as compared to "Features".

 

Each customer can be defined a specific SLA level so that your guaranteed response times on a ticket can be different depending on what customers are assigned to a ticket and what SLA you have contracted to them for.

 

Notifications of SLA violations and pending violations are sent via Email and color coding is used on the user interface.  Choose to whom notifications are sent to (users and/or groups) and when they are sent for warnings and violations.

 

Colored notifications on the user interface can be seen in all ticket grids using an familiar Red and Yellow scheme.