Community Knowledge Base

Defining Workflows and SLAs

Although SmarterTrack doesn't have specific settings pertaining to SLAs or workflows, its event-driven architecture makes defining SLAs and workflows easy and efficient.

Using the events system, managers can configure events at the system and user levels and set up automated actions based on those events to ensure employees are meeting SLAs and staying on top of their workflow. For example, the events system can be used to:

  • Ensure customer satisfaction with quality control related events based upon time and/or content.
  • Bring secondary groups or individual agents online when load or wait times exceed company standards.
  • Automatically escalate tickets when the number of responses or idle time reaches certain parameters.

Similarly, agents can use the events system to ensure they are responding to tickets in a timely manner by configuring an event action that notifies them when they receive a new ticket or when a customer responds to a ticket.

In addition, SmarterTrack's task management system allows agents and managers to proactively manage the workflow process while improving organization, efficiency and productivity. Because tasks are often associated to a customer service or sales issue, SmarterTrack also allows agents to add related tickets, live chats and call logs to any task in the system. This ability ensures agents can have all the information necessary to complete a task in one convenient location. To help agents meet business deadlines, SmarterTrack also allows agents to configure reminders and events based upon each task.

Practical Application

The events system in SmarterTrack acts just like "macros" that other help desk products offer. You set actions to occur based on a set number of conditions. Let's look at an example.

At SmarterTools, we offer Emergency Support for those times when a customer runs into a business-critical situation with one of our products. For example, they are performing an upgrade, but something happens during the upgrade process (e.g., they run out of disk space), and their installation fails. With their mail server unresponsive, they submit an Emergency Support ticket to us.

Our SLA for responding to Emergency Support tickets is 1 hour. (We regularly easily beat that, by the way, and average response times MUCH faster than 1 hour.) In order to ensure that the ticket is received, and that an agent responds, we have a few different events set up that offer varying degrees of notification if certain timeframes aren't met. Initially, when an emergency ticket is received, we have an event that sends an email out to all technical support agents, and an email is sent to the SMS address of each agent as well so they receive a text message notifying them of the ticket. If that ticket isn't "taken" by an agent within 15 minutes, a separate event sends an escalation notice (email and SMS) to the manager responsible for support. Other events are set up to further escalate to our COO if the ticket isn't replied to within 30, and then 45 minutes.

Using the event system, then, is a great way to ensure any SLA you have set for your business is met. Events can be created for almost every area of SmarterTrack, not just for tickets or live chats. Events can be created for task management, KBs, and more.