SLA Tips and Tricks

Hi there! Cat here from the Front support team 🌻

Our support team are located across the US, Europe and APAC and the way that we set up our SLA is to have it apply within business hours, something like this:

In conjunction with Load Balancing rules that assign conversations to the whole team as well as Shifts to manage everyone’s schedules, this works pretty well! Our business hours are set up so that they cover pretty much the whole period where someone on our team is available (i.e. Monday morning in Melbourne right through to the end of day on Friday in San Francisco). Some helpful guides on these topics are linked below:

• SLA rules
• Load Balancing assignment
• Shifts
• Business hours

Are there any particular scenarios you are worried about with your team?

Cheers,
Cat

Hi Cat,

Thanks for sharing the insights! The strategies you’ve outlined are very much in line with how we operate within our organisation as well. With team members spread across multiple time zones (we have some operating in the UAE, some parts of Asia and the main offices are in Africa), we also utilise load balancing rules and shifts to ensure coverage and efficiency. Our SLA is set up in a similar manner, applying within business hours to accommodate the diverse locations of our team—ensuring there’s almost always someone available to respond, from the start of the day until the end of the day. Using SLAs to assign tickets to another team we created called the after-hours team that responds to messages that the rest of the team may have missed.

For this, there was a rule set in place that moves the tickets after 5:00pm from the main inbox into the after-hours box.

We’ve found this system to be effective in managing our response times while keeping workloads balanced across different regions. The flexibility of adjusting business hours and schedules to match the various time zones has been key to ensuring consistent support across all regions.

Appreciate the resources you’ve provided; they’ll definitely be useful as we continue to refine our processes.