How can I apply SLAs to several existing organizations? Do I have to edit each organization individually?

Environment:

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Resolution:

You can use rules to apply service level agreements (SLAs) to a contact record or organization record. This allows you to apply SLA instances automatically to contacts or organizations that meet specific criteria. You can also remove SLA instances using actions in a rule.

If a contact is associated to an organization, the SLA MUST be applied to the organization record. The SLA can only be applied to a contact record if the contact is not associated with an organization record.

Note: These steps associate an SLA to the contact or organization. This does not mean that the SLA is automatically associated to incidents submitted by that contact or organization. In cases where incidents need to be assigned to a specific SLA based on your support requirements, you can manually specify the SLA instance for an incident that is opened from the administration console, or you can use incident rules to apply the SLA instance to the incident based on criteria set for the incident (for example, based on custom fields).

Create Rules to Apply SLAs

To apply SLAs to a group of organizations or contacts, you must first create a simple rulebase that includes a rule with an action that applies the SLA. Within your site, if contacts are associated to organizations, then you would set up organization rules to apply the SLA to the organization records. Otherwise, you would create a set of contact rules that would apply the SLA to the individual contact record.

Once the rulebase is set up and activated, then you can multi-select several organizations or contact records and update those records so that they will match the rule.

One approach is to create a custom field for your organization or contact records. In the rule, you can specify in the IF part of the rule that if the custom field equals a certain value, THEN the SLA should be applied. This allows you to specify right in the record whether or not the SLA should be applied. This also allows staff to easily see why an SLA may or may not have been applied to the record.

Note: Setting up a rulebase for contacts or organizations is quite similar to the ruleset for incidents. Your ruleset must have an initial state and best practices strongly recommends that you transition all existing records into a non-initial rule state.

Be sure to activate your rulebase.

Updating the Records

With your rules in place, the next step is to update an initial test record. To do this, use a view or report that lists your organizations or contact records and search for at least one record of interest. Edit a record that you would like to apply the SLA instance to and set the organization or contact fields so that they will match the IF criteria set in your rule. If you wish, you can multi-select two records to ensure that multi-editing the records will trigger the rule to apply the SLAs. Then click Save.

When the records are saved, they should match the rule and have the SLA instance applied (or removed). Verify this action by opening the record or records and checking the contents of the SLA field.

In addition, use the Rule Log to determine if the incident hit the rule you were expecting. If the SLA was not applied as expected, use the Rule Log to determine which rules the record matched when it was updated. Note that when using the Rule Log with organization and contact records, you must use the record ID value. This is visible, with the record open, by clicking the Info icon from the top ribbon or hovering over the workspace tab.  For more information on the rule log, refer to Answer ID 1873: Using the Rule Log to troubleshoot rules.

If the test records have the correct SLA instance applied, you can multi-select more organizations or contacts and edit the records so that they will be acted upon by the rule to apply the SLA. After you have edited the records that you need to, determine whether you should keep the rule or not. If this is not part of your long-term business process, edit your rules to delete or disable the rule and then click Activate to resave the rulebase.

Additional Considerations

If the SLA is used to provide specific support features such as a limited number of incidents or specific response and resolutions times, you must also determine how the SLA instance is associated with the specific incident. Agents can assign the SLA to the incident manually or you can configure incident rules to set the SLA field in the incident based on specific criteria you configure.