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

We have a section below on how to leverage User Groups to create Rotations for on-call teams and time-based assignment.

​

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.

​

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”.

​

Channel-level Eligibility

Members of a channel are marked as a “Customer”, meaning their messages trigger new tickets, or an “Agent”, meaning their responses will move tickets to in progress. Customer messages will trigger tickets if you have automatic ticket tracking enabled.

• For Slack Connect channels shared outside of your organization, anyone who is not a member of your team will be a Customer by default.
• For internal channels like #it-support, everyone will be a Customer by default, and you can specify who the Agents are who will be responding to tickets

You can always toggle users from Customer to Agent and vice versa.

​

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.

​

Rotations

Unthread will leverage Slack User Groups to set up rotations of assignees that can distribute tickets evenly across a given set of team members.

Key Settings to highlight:

• Assign to individual or cycle through: Opt to assign tickets directly to an individual or continue to rotate assignments to different team members if there is no reply.
• Cycle To Next Agent After: If an agent doesn’t respond to a customer ticket within a designated time, the ticket will be reassigned to another team member.
• Max Number Of Cycles: Define the maximum number of reassignment cycles a ticket will undergo if it remains unaddressed. Select the no max option which will cause this cycle to continue or rotate amongst your team members.
• Go To Next Step If No Assignee Found?: Automatically move to the next step in the workflow if no team member is available to respond to the ticket.

After configuring your SLA settings, navigate to the “Assignment & SLA” section in your general settings. Under the load balancing method option, choose from the following:

• Round Robin: Distribute tickets evenly among the Unthread team members.
• Random: Randomly assign tickets to team members.

​

Cross-Regional Support Teams

Many customers seek the ability to assign cross-regional support based on operating hours. For example, you may have a team in New York and another in London should be able to collectively address customer issues around the clock.

To set this up, first navigate to “Settings” > “Slack” from your dashboard.

Enable Away Tracking which will automatically determine their availability based on Slack status. By doing so, Unthread will assign tickets only to those who are currently online.

With Unthread now set up to track away statuses, go to your SLA settings and create a new configuration.

As an example, consider 2 support teams that operate in different timezones:

• New York Team
• London Team

In this case, we’ll assign to each team, and skip over the one that isn’t currently online or available.

You’ll see an option for Go to next step if no assignee is found? option and select ‘yes’. This ensures that if all support reps are offline after business hours, Unthread will automatically proceed to the next step.

In the next step, next to the Assign conversation to section, designate the London Team as the assignee. If no one in the New York team is online, the ticket will be re-reouted instead to the London team.

​

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.