Prioritize performance with Zendesk’s new SLAs feature

Great customer service is built on meeting customer expectations in a timely manner. When your support center is solving multiple issues across myriad customers though, how do you prioritize which issues should be solved first? Enter the Service Level Agreement. An SLA makes sure that a business and its customers see eye-to-eye on service expectations with regard to how quickly your team responds to and resolves issues. Simply put, SLAs help businesses stay true to the promises they make to customers.

Zendesk’s new SLAs feature was designed to make it as easy as possible for agents to meet service agreements. Once an administrator defines a SLA policy in Zendesk, agents will be able to prioritize tickets that are approaching a policy breach. In order to keep you in compliance with any SLA, it also includes the ability to have complex and specific SLA conditions similar to triggers and automations, to set policies down to the minute, and to alter SLA targets depending on ticket priority.

SLAs aren’t just for contracts with your VIP clients either. More and more businesses rely on them as a tool to improve overall performance. For example, SLAs can be used to help your teams:

• Follow Policy: If your company has published a standard for response or wait times, SLAs help codify those standards by priority level so you can track performance down to the minute and prioritize accordingly.
• Set Team Goals: Even if you don’t publicly declare your SLAs, you may notice that a particular response time, or wait time threshold, yields better CSAT numbers. Use SLAs to set and track team goals.
• Meet Obligations: In some cases you may sell a higher tier of service, or have a special class of customers who have written support clauses into their contract. SLAs can help you track these special cases too.
• Test Promotions: Your marketing team might be considering advertising a faster service window than the competition. You can use SLAs to test your response and wait times before officially launching the promotion.

Starting today, Zendesk Plus and Enterprise accounts have the option to use the new SLAs feature to track and comply with customer Service Level Agreements.

Learn how to set up and manage new SLAs in your Zendesk