Service level agreement (SLA) policies in Talkdesk Cases™ define the commitments that your team looks to fulfill for customers. Specifically, they can be measured in a quantitative way, as Administrators set time targets for cases that meet certain conditions.
SLA policies can also serve as standards to measure your customer support team performance. In this connection, Talkdesk provides a centralized dashboard, helping Administrators gain insights into key metrics about SLA policies, such as fulfillment time and SLA breaches. For more information, see Case SLA Dashboard.
Understanding How SLA Policies Work
When creating an SLA policy, an Administrator needs to specify conditions for the commitment. These conditions determine whether the SLA policy can be applied to cases. In other words, they represent a way to filter cases so the Administrator can further set time targets for them. The following are some examples of conditions in an SLA policy:
- The case type is “Question”.
- The requester is not “Chris Walker”.
- The case is created on and after “December 25th, 2021”.
- Tags contain “mortgage” and “delay”.
- The group is “empty”.
Conditions are specified mainly based on case fields. The Administrator can decide whether the SLA policy is applicable to cases that meet all the conditions or any of the conditions.
After the conditions are set, the Administrator needs to define time targets for cases at different priority levels. For example, urgent cases may have a shorter target. Specifically, the time target contains Requester wait time and Agent work time, which are calculated based on how long a case stays in different statuses. For more information, see Understanding Conditions and Targets in Service Level Agreements.
After an SLA policy is applied to a case, Agents can see the remaining target time of the case, both in case views and on the case processing page, thus taking action accordingly.
Note: For cases without the “Priority” field defined, no SLA policy is applied.
Understanding Case and SLA Policy Behavior
A newly created SLA policy is not applicable to existing cases. However, if an existing case is updated and meets the conditions, the SLA policy will be applied. In other words, there must be some kinds of changes, or updates, in cases before SLA policies can take effect on them. Otherwise, cases do not display any SLA information, or keep showing the countdown of the previous SLA policy applied.
The following table lists some major scenarios about potential case or SLA policy changes.
| Scenario | Case and SLA policy behavior |
| A case is created. | The corresponding SLA policy will be applied if the case meets the conditions. When multiple applicable policies exist, the policy that is placed higher in the policy list is applied. For more information, see Creating and Managing Service Level Agreement Policies. |
| A case is resolved. | All SLA policies will be closed. |
| A case is reopened after it was resolved. | An SLA policy will be applied if the case meets the conditions. |
| The case priority changes, while the SLA policy applied to this case has no change. | The time target on the case will be updated to reflect the priority level accordingly. |
| A new SLA policy is created. | The new policy will not be applied to existing cases. It is only applicable to new cases. |
| An SLA policy is reordered. | Existing cases where the SLA policy has already been applied will not be affected. |
| An SLA policy is updated. | Existing cases where the SLA policy has already been applied will not be affected. |
| An SLA policy is deleted. | Existing cases where the SLA policy has been applied will not be affected. Namely, the deleted SLA policy continues to be effective for these existing cases. |
| A new SLA policy is applied in a case where the previous policy has already been breached. | The SLA history on the case will not be changed. After the new SLA policy is applied, the SLA countdown starts from that time point. |