Service Level Agreements

A service level agreement (SLA) defines the agreement and formal commitments between a service provider and a customer.

The agreement documents the service to be provided or received, the agreed upon service levels for the service, and the means of measuring or quantifying the level of service. In some service level agreements, the service provider is your company, providing services to either an external customer or an internal customer such as other departments within the company. In other cases, the service provider is an external vendor who is providing services to your company.

You can apply an SLA to ticket records or to activity records. To apply an SLA means to associate an SLA with the record. When an SLA is applied to a record, the record can be tracked as part of an SLA monitoring process.

An SLA can be applied in several ways:

• The system might apply an SLA automatically through a workflow or escalation process, or through another SLA.
• An agent can use the Apply an SLA action. With this method, the system chooses and applies the most appropriate SLA or SLAs to the record.
• An agent can use the Select or Deselect an SLA action to view and select an SLA to apply to a ticket record.
  Note: The Select or Deselect an SLA action is not available within the ticket applications for activities on a ticket record. To view and select an SLA for an activity, use the Activities and Tasks application.

The SLA Hold feature can be used to put a ticket on hold if you are waiting to receive further information.