You’re able to define an SLA (Service Level Agreement) response time for your Q&A activity, where you can define how quickly your team needs to make sure there is a response to visitors questions.  This helps ensure that your asking visitors get a prompt response and have a positive experience with your organization and brand.

Enabling an SLA for Your Site

You will see that under your “Settings > General Settings” you now have the ability to enable a default SLA response time for your system, which will apply generally to any questions that are posted.  You can also choose whether your turnaround time will be communicated to users or not, or if it will simply be a turnaround time that is used by your team to control quality.

You can also set these response times per category or even on the question level, which helps you manage cases when there are certain questions or types of questions that require quicker attention than others.  You can find those options under the “Settings” tab when looking at a question or category.

Setting SLA Reminders

When you’ve set SLA response times for questions that come in, you can have your moderators reminded when a question has not been responded to and is either approaching the SLA or has past the defined response time.  You can enable a moderator’s ability to be assigned to content and be notified about content under their moderation settings (user’s admin profile, under the “Moderation” tab), where you can see a new option to enable SLA reminders.

Managing SLA Reminders

When a question’s SLA approaches the time that it is due, it will be assigned to the appropriate moderators based on the settings above and they will receive an email letting them know that the question is coming up to the time that it is due.  Additional reminders will be sent if the question becomes due or has gone past its due date, helping to ensure that your team stays on top of any overdue questions and manages those.

The questions will be assigned to the appropriate users who are responsible for SLA reminders, and they’ll be able to see the content that has spawned a reminder in their “My Work” area.

These tools allow you and your team to make sure you’re providing quality responses to your audience in a timely manner.  Everybody loves responsive support, so we encourage you to use these tools to help you be on top of your inquiries for the good of your business and your customers.