Creating your SLA Rules in Help Scout
Here's how you can create different SLAs per Mailbox, Customer, Company or Tag in Help Scout.
In Super SLA, each different set of conditions and timings is called a "Rule" - so if you have a "VIP Customer" SLA, then a "Standard" SLA, those are two rules. You can have up to 50 SLA Rules on the Pro plan, which should be plenty!
If you'd like help setting up your rules, please feel free to drop us an email!
To create a new SLA Rule:
- Click "Rules" in the left hand sidebar, then "Add rule". You can add a name to your Rule with the "Edit" pencil.
- Now, set your conditions. This is where you chose which tickets this Rule should apply to. In this case, we've included any tickets in the "Super SLA Testing" mailbox with the tag "welcome":
You can click "View" next to the "4 matching tickets" text in order to ensure you've captured all the relevant tickets.
Because Help Scout doesn't record customer companies, Super SLA lets you target based on "Customer domain" - so if their email address is "joe.bloggs@acme.com", you can choose "acme.com" as the Customer domain and tickets from any "@acme.com" address will be included in your rule
You can also set "Exclude conditions" the same way - so if you'd like to exclude any ticket tagged test for example.
- Next, set your SLA thresholds. These are the timings for your SLA rule. You can set these based on:
a) First response: When the first agent response to a ticket is sent
b) Every response: For tickets with more touches, this is the distance between every reply to a customer
c) Resolution: This is when the ticket is marked "Closed" in Help Scout
You can choose any time you like, and whether that should be Calendar time (i.e anytime) or Business time (only including Working days and hours)
See "Business Hours" for more about how business hours work.
In this example, the SLA will not be met if:
a) The ticket is not first responded to within 60 business minutes of it being opened
b) If any subsequent reply takes more than 6 business hours
c) If the ticket is not closed within 5 business days.
- Last but not least, you can configure your alerting rules. This is how you're going to make sure you never miss another SLA! Click "New alert" to add a new alert (you can have as many alerts as you like per Rule)
You can choose how quickly before or after an SLA violation you'd like to send an alert - perhaps you want to warn the Ticket Owner 30 minutes before a ticket will violate SLA, and also escalate to management if a ticket breaches SLA by more than 2 hours.
You can send alerts vis SMS, Phone call, Email or Slack.
Your team don't need to be Super SLA users to receive alerts - you can add as many recipients as you like by clicking "Recipients" in the left hand navigation bar.
- You're done! Click "Save" and your Rule is now in effect
It may take up to 30 minutes for your Rule to collect all the tickets that apply
