Assignments, Escalations, and SLAs
Unthread provides a series of automations to ensure that your customers are always responded to and issues are always resolved in the shortest time possible.
Assignment rules will run automatically when a new conversation is created and will run until a response is given to the customer.
Escalation paths and SLAs can be set on a per-customer basis, so you can set different rules depending on your relationship with that account.
Configuring SLAs
SLAs are the primary way to set rules to ensure an initial response to a customer. There are multiple types of steps that you can configure, and we’ll walk through them below:
Default SLAs
By heading over to “Settings” > “Slack”, you can set up the default SLAs that will be used for all customers
Per-customer SLA
From a customer’s profile, navigate to the “Settings” tab, and you’ll have the ability to set a custom SLA. This is helpful if you have specific reps or different SLAs for individual customers.
SLA Options
Assign Conversation
You can assign conversations to an individual or a Slack user group, which will send them a notification about the conversation.
Assign to Individual
You can choose an individual person by their name and email address.
Assign to Primary or Secondary Support Rep
When selected, the user listed as the primary or secondary support rep of the customer will be assigned. You can set per-customer support reps in the customer’s settings page.
Assign to User Group
You can assign dynamically to a Slack user group (e.g. “on-call”).
You can choose to either:
- Assign to one member of the group
- Cycle through members of the group, giving each member a specific amount of time to respond before reassigning
Choosing an assignee:
- Round robin: this will evenly distribute conversations among members
- Random: an assignee will be chosen at random from the list
Do you have primary support reps stored in your CRM? Awesome, check out our Salesforce and Hubspot integrations
Escalate conversation
This will increment the “Escalation” level, and reassign the conversation to someone else on your team. The new assignee will get a DM of the escalation, and the message will appear in their inbox.
We’ll provide reports on how often messages are being escalated to help you identify shortcomings in your process.
Send Slack reminder to assignee
This will send an automated message from Unthread to the current assignee of the message reminding them of the open ticket. This can be a helpful ping for forgetful folks!
Post conversation to triage channel
This will automatically triage the message to an internal channel for further discussion. You’ll define the triage channel globally on your main settings page.
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Managing Eligible Assignees
By default, anyone in your account’s email domain will be eligible to be assigned tickets, and anyone outside of the domain is considered a “Customer.” Customer messages will trigger tickets if you have automatic ticket tracking enabled.
Anyone on your team who is eligible for assignments will be assigned conversations when they respond, and it will automatically change the status of the conversation to “In progress”.
Team-level Eligibility
From your “Team” tab in your Unthread dashboard, you’ll see a column titled “Can Respond to Tickets”. If set to “yes”, then they can be assigned new conversations and mark them as in progress when they respond to a customer. You can override this setting by clicking on the user name and going to their profile.
By default, all team members are eligible to respond to customer conversations, but you can also manage the default by clicking the “Options” button in the team tab.
Editing this option is an advanced setting, and you’ll need to be sure that you have some team members eligible to respond in order to properly track response times.
Channel-level Eligibility
By default, anyone outside of your Slack workspace’s domain is considered a “Customer.” Customer messages will trigger tickets if you have automatic ticket tracking enabled.
When you look in a customer profile, you’ll see a list of members. They will be marked as a “Customer” (i.e. will create new conversations), or an “Agent” (i.e. can be assigned conversations). In the case of an internal support channel (e.g. #IT-support), you can manually mark team members as “Customers” so they will trigger tickets to be created.
Once you’ve marked someone as a channel customer, new conversations will be tracked when they post in the channel.
Handling Holidays & Vacations
You can set an away status and back-up representative for any team member who won’t be online for a given time frame. You can either manually set away status or sync away status from Slack.