How SLAs Work with Organizations and Contacts

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract that can be applied to customers, both organizations and contacts, in Service.

SLAs let you specify and track the level and type of support a customer is eligible to receive. For example, an SLA might include the number of questions that can be submitted through different channels and the duration of support. Administrators create generic SLAs (that is, an SLA template) that can then be applied to specific customers. An SLA instance is a copy of the generic SLA applied to a unique customer. SLA instances can be applied automatically through business rules or manually by staff members. Familiarize yourself with the following points before adding or editing organizations.

• SLAs can be applied to contacts and organizations. Contacts that are not associated with an organization can have their own SLA instances. However, contacts that are associated with an organization do not have individual SLA instances. Instead, they are covered under the SLAs applied to their organization.
• Customers can view and track their SLAs on the Account Overview page of the customer portal, where SLAs are called contracts. Depending on how your administrator has configured the customer portal, all contacts associated with an organization may be able to view the responses to questions submitted by all contacts within their organization.
• Your administrator can set up business rules to automatically apply SLA instances to organizations or contacts when incidents enter the system (from the Ask a Question page, email, or chat). After applying an SLA instance, business rules can then credit the incident to the specific SLA.
• If your organization uses SLAs and you have SLA permissions set in your profile, part of your duties may be to apply SLA instances to organizations and to contacts that do not have an organization association. See SLA Instance Field for specific instructions about applying SLA instances.