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SLA for shared mailbox
Plan: Pro and Elite
A Service Level Agreement or SLA is a mutually agreed measure of service which a support team provides to its customers. With proper SLAs in place, both the expectation of the client and the level of service expected from the support team become clear.
With Hiver, you can create SLAs for shared mailboxes based on the Service Level Agreement. This will help your support team to be more responsive by highlighting the emails that violate SLA.
SLAs are always specific to a shared mailbox. You can create multiple SLAs for a shared mailbox as long as the conditions are unique.
You can create one SLA per condition. The trigger for SLA violation will depend upon either or both First Response Time and Resolve Time.
Create an SLA
- Click on the yellow Hiver icon on your Gmail and select the 'Admin Panel' option to view the Admin Dashboard
- Click on the 'Shared Mailbox' tab (second tab from the top) to view the list of shared mailboxes on your account
- Choose the shared mailbox where you want to set up the SLA and click anywhere on the row to view the options
- Click on the 'SLA' tab
- Click on the prominent green button 'Create SLA'
Input fields required
- Name :
Enter a name for the SLA here. Try to give a meaningful name as it will be shown in the SLA violation notification.
- Apply SLA on:
Here you can specify the coverage of the SLA. You can either choose
- All Emails: This means that the SLA will be applied to all the emails received in the shared mailbox
- All Emails with Tags: This means that you can specify that the SLA will be applied only to the emails in the shared mailbox which have a specific Tag.
- Trigger Condition:
Here you can specify the condition for SLA violation. You can choose either or both of the conditions
- First Response Time: This is the time taken for the first response to be sent by the team to the customer.
- Resolve Time: This is the time taken for the email thread to be effectively resolved or 'closed'.
- How time should be calculated: Here it is set to Calendar Hours by default.
- Notify user: In this section, we can specify the users of the shared mailbox who will receive a notification when the SLA is violated.
What happens when an SLA is violated
When an SLA is violated, then
- A notification will be sent to all the users specified in the 'Notify User' field.
- The tag 'SLA violation' will also get applied to the email.
- An activity feed on the addition of the tag will also be generated.
- The email will be added to the 'Overdue' view. Click here to learn more about views.
Conditions for SLA violation
First Response Time
This is the time taken by the team to send the first response after the first incoming email is received in a shared mailbox.
Resolve Time
This is the total time an email was in 'Open' state. When a closed email is re-opened, then the "Resolve Time" timer picks up from the previously calculated time and not from '0'. The duration an email stays in 'Pending' state does not contribute to the 'Resolve Time' timer. As in the previous case, if the first email in an email conversation is sent from the shared mailbox id or by any user of the shared mailbox, then the timer for 'Resolve Time' will start only after the first incoming email is received from the customer.
View/ Edit/ Delete SLAs on a shared mailbox
- Go to the Hiver Admin dashboard
- Click on the 'Shared Mailbox' tab (second from the top) to see the list of shared mailboxes on the Hiver account
- Click anywhere on the shared mailbox row for which you want to edit/ delete/ view the SLA policy, to view the shared mailbox options
- Click on the 'SLA' tab on the left to see the list of SLAs on the shared mailbox.
- You can edit/ delete or disable any SLA from here.
Track SLAs based on Business Hours
If you’ve linked your shared mailbox to a Business Hour Template, every time you create or edit an SLA, you should see a simple checkbox for Business Hours.
Select the checkbox if you want the SLA to account only for Business Hours and leave it unchecked if you want to configure SLAs for calendar hours.
Important things to note
- SLAs are applied to emails which arrive after it has been created.
- A user cannot apply a 'SLA violation' tag on an email.
- Even when a SLA is deleted, the tag and the activity feed generated by the SLA will stay on the emails.
- When a Tag is manually applied to an email which brings it under the scope of a SLA, then the 'First Response Time' and 'Resolve Time' timers will start when the email arrived in the shared mailbox/ or to the original recipient of the email and not from the time the Tag was added.
- When an email is added to the shared mailbox using the 'Add to Shared Mailbox' button, then both the timers will start from the time the email had arrived to the original recipient of the email and not from the time the email was added to the shared mailbox.
