Last year I wrote an introduction on Zendesk Service Level Agreements and how to use them in views. Since SLAs are now also a key metric to be used in Omnichannel Routing, it's worth revisiting this topic and see what's been changed since the original article.

If you haven't read it yet, it's worth a look before diving into the new features.

My approach to setting up Zendesk SLA Policies and enabling Group Policies.

In this article we’ll explore the new Group SLA policies in Zendesk, lay out an approach to setup a scalable SLA policy across your instance and make sure agents take care of the right ticket first.

Internal NoteThomas Verschoren

Overview of the available metrics

When it comes to setting up SLAs in Zendesk, the basic premise has not really changed. You can measure different points in the lifecycle of a ticket, and you can choose to enable some, or all, of the metrics.

Each SLA policy contains three key elements.

• A name and description that clearly defines the SLA in your reporting. I recommend setting up two default SLA policies. One for your messaging based tickets, and another for traditional email based tickets. If needed, you can create additional, more strict, policies if certain customers or topics require it.
• The scope of the policy defines to which tickets the policy applies. As mentioned earlier, I prefer doing a scope for Messaging and Email based tickets, but you can add more policies with specific scopes like brand, user type or topic.
• Target Metrics are the actual core of your SLA setup, they define what time you want to measure and report on. Each metric can be defined for each of the four priorities: low, normal, high, urgent. You can define those metrics in Calendar or Business hours. Personally I prefer business hours since you can only control what you do while your team is working, but customers might count in calendar time (I submitted this on Friday and you replied on Monday, I've been waiting for 4 days!) so you might choose to do your setup based on Calendar hours.

New in Zendesk for a while now is a full reorganization of these metrics. Instead of one long list of metrics, you now have three distinct categories.

1. Reply Metrics, which measure how long a customer is waiting for a reply.
2. Update Metrics, which measure the time in between replies, making sure the customer is staying up to date with longer tickets.
3. Resolution Metrics, which measure time spent across the lifecycle of a ticket from creation till resolution.

Let's dive in!

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