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Is it possible to implement a “time to first response” SLA that only looks at the time between the first message and the subsequent reply?

 

Use case: Implement a Time to First Response SLA which measures the time from the very first message received in a conversation, to the very first reply sent.

 

I’ve tried implementing the rule with a “when” condition of “doesn’t have tag ‘First Reply Sent’”, which is added by another rule when the first reply is sent. 

However, this seems to do weird things with reporting, as the analytics can see that an SLA breach tag is added when the SLA is breached, then removed when the reply is sent, but seems to think that the SLA no longer applies because the First Reply Sent tag has been added, so it doesn’t show the conversation in the “SLA breaches” stats. Note that it does show the conversation in the “SLA breach time (avg)” stat, which is a little confusing

 

If there’s another way to implement this, please let me know!

Hi there Angus, Cat here from Front’s support team.

My first thought on this was to use a dynamic variable in your SLA rule to determine the number of existing messages in the conversation and use that to trigger the SLA or not. However I’m afraid dynamic variables are not available to SLA rules, so this isn’t possible!

→ Understanding Smart Rule variables

At the moment, it looks like the workflow you’re looking for isn’t strictly possible. If this is functionality that you would like to see implemented in the future, I would encourage you to submit a request for it at this link. Our Product team reviews and publishes ideas weekly to be viewed on this list, so keep an eye out for your request and other customer's reactions to it!

Cheers,
Cat

Hi Angus,

I’ve been chatting with some of our experts around this, and while we don’t currently have the option to create a SLA just for first replies, you can use the First reply time metric to track an average. You can then drill into the intervals using the Overview report: Replies chart to check any outliers.

In addition you could also use a rule with the “Unreplied after” condition to trigger notification rules - similar behaviour to the SLA rules - these would not strictly be an SLA or appear in the SLAs report, but you can use these to add unique tags that you can track and also notify teammates so that they prioritise these conversations.

→ Guide to rule triggers, conditions, and actions

Cheers,
Cat

Thanks Cat - we’ll continue to use the functionality as-is but very keen to be able to implement more flexible SLA rules

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