Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a cornerstone of effective customer support, and they are a core function within Supportbench. This guide will walk you through what SLAs are, how to manage them for individual cases, and how to control who has permission to change them.
An SLA is a commitment to your customers regarding the timeliness of your support. It defines a target for how long a customer can expect to wait for a response or a resolution. By setting and meeting SLAs, you:
Manage Customer Expectations: Customers know when they can expect to hear back from you.
Ensure Accountability: Your support team has clear, measurable goals for response times, promoting a high standard of service.
Build Trust: Consistently meeting your SLAs demonstrates reliability and a commitment to your customers.
In Supportbench, SLAs are typically assigned automatically to new cases through workflows, ensuring consistency across your organization.
While automated workflows handle most situations, there are times when you need to manually override a case's SLA. This flexibility is crucial for handling unique circumstances.
Common reasons to manually adjust an SLA include:
A customer is unavailable or on vacation.
You have a scheduled meeting with the customer to resolve the issue.
An issue requires more extensive, long-term investigation.
You and the customer have mutually agreed on a different timeline.
To manually change the SLA on a case:
Navigate to and open the case you wish to modify.
In the top-left corner of the case view, click on the currently set SLA.
In the pop-up window that appears, set the new target date and time.
Click Save to apply the new SLA.
It's not always ideal for every agent to have the ability to change an SLA, as it could be used to avoid a breach without proper cause. For this reason, the default "Agent" security role in Supportbench does not have this permission.
You can easily grant or restrict this ability for any role.
To configure role permissions for SLA changes:
Click on Configuration in the top navigation bar.
From the left-hand menu, navigate to Organization and then select Roles.
Choose the role you would like to edit (e.g., "Agent," "Supervisor").
Scroll down to the Cases section of the permissions list.
Check or uncheck the box for "Ability to alter the SLA date on a case" to grant or revoke permission.
Save your changes.
This is a critical behavior to understand: A manually set SLA will be reset to the workflow-defined default whenever the case is updated.
For example, if you manually set an SLA for next Friday, but the customer replies to the case tomorrow, the system will re-evaluate the case. The workflow will then re-apply the default SLA, overwriting your manual setting.
What this means for you: If you need a manual SLA to persist, you must re-apply it after any case updates occur. This feature ensures that active, ongoing conversations always fall back into the standard, automated process unless explicitly overridden again.
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