In this article, w've covered:
Introduction: Why Thena's SLAs?
The Challenge: Juggling Expectations
Thena's Solution: Tailored SLA Policies
What Makes Thena's SLA Policies Truly Powerful?
Why This is a Big Step Forward for B2B Customer Support
Practical Use Cases for Your Team
Mastering Support Expectations with Thena's SLAs
In the world of B2B customer support, consistency and timely communication are key to building trust and maintaining strong relationships. Your customers expect clear response times, and your team needs reliable tools to meet those promises. That’s where Service Level Agreements (SLAs) come in, and at Thena, we’ve built a smart, flexible way to manage them. Thena's SLA policies help you define and track response expectations, ensuring your team delivers timely, consistent support, every time.
The Challenge of Juggling Support Expectations
Without clear SLA policies, support teams can struggle to prioritize effectively. It’s hard to know which tickets need attention first, whether a response is truly overdue, or how performance measures up against customer expectations. Manually tracking these benchmarks is time-consuming and prone to errors. Generic, one-size-fits-all SLA rules often don't account for the nuances of different ticket types, customer tiers, or unique situations that arise in real-world support.
Thena's Tailored SLA Policy Solution
Thena empowers you to create multiple, highly tailored SLA policies, moving beyond rigid rules to genuinely smart management. You can define specific policies for different ticket types, priority levels, or even the source of the customer inquiry. Each SLA policy in Thena is designed for clear, effective management, making it easy to apply and differentiate across your teams. An SLA policy in Thena includes three core components that give you complete command:
Conditions: These define precisely when an SLA policy should be applied.
Target Metrics: These set the time-based goals your team aims for.
Advanced Options: These provide the flexibility to pause timers when external factors come into play.
Powerful Features of Thena's SLA Policies
We’ve engineered Thena's SLA features to provide the control and visibility your modern support team needs:
Flexible Conditions: Build rules based on any event or field in Thena, giving you incredible flexibility. Common options include ticket Priority, Sentiment, Status, Account, or even Custom fields you’ve set up. You can use 'match all' or 'match any' logic to fine-tune exactly when a policy is triggered. Whether it’s based on form input, ticket source, priority, or sentiment—conditions can be as broad or specific as your workflows require, ensuring the right SLA applies to the right ticket.
Defined Target Metrics: Choose which response times truly matter for your team and set clear, time-based goals for each. You can define targets in minutes, hours, or days for:
First response time: How quickly do you acknowledge an initial inquiry?
Resolution time: How long does it take to fully resolve a customer's issue?
Update time: How consistently do you provide progress updates on ongoing tickets?
Next response time: How quickly do you follow up after the customer replies?
Smart Advanced Options (Pause Conditions): Life happens, and not every delay is your team's fault. Use pause conditions to temporarily stop the SLA timer. This is great for real-world situations like:
Waiting on a customer response.
Tickets in internal review processes.
Blockers that are completely outside your team’s control. These conditions can be layered using 'ALL/ANY' logic for powerful flexibility, ensuring your SLA reporting accurately reflects your team's performance.
Live SLA Tracking: Once an SLA is applied, its status shows up directly on tickets – both in notifications and ticket details. This means your team always has real-time visibility into where things stand:
✅ SLA met (e.g., Achieved in 14m)
🟨 SLA due soon (e.g., Due in 16m)
🔴 SLA breached (e.g., Overdue by 9m) This immediate visual feedback empowers your team to prioritize effectively and take action before it’s too late, ensuring commitments are met.
A Big Step Forward for B2B Customer Support
Thena's SLA policies transform how B2B support teams manage expectations and deliver service. This means:
Consistent Service Delivery: Ensure every customer, regardless of their issue or origin, receives a predictable and high-quality response.
Enhanced Team Accountability: Clear targets and live tracking foster a culture of ownership and timely action within your team.
Improved Customer Trust: Meeting defined response times consistently builds strong customer relationships and reinforces your commitment to their success.
Optimized Workflows: Use data from SLA performance to identify bottlenecks, refine processes, and continuously improve your support operations.
Fair Performance Measurement: With flexible pause conditions, your SLA data accurately reflects your team's effort and doesn't penalize them for external delays. It's about making your support team more reliable, more efficient, and more transparent, ultimately leading to happier B2B customers.
Practical SLA Use Cases
Here’s how Thena's SLA policies can work in real-world scenarios:
Tiered Support Expectations:
Policy: 'Premium Customer SLA'
Conditions: Account type is 'Premium'
Targets: First response < 30m, Resolution < 4h
Benefit: Ensures your highest-value customers always get top-tier service.
Critical Bug Response:
Policy: 'Urgent Bug SLA'
Conditions: Priority is 'Critical' AND Ticket Type is 'Bug'
Targets: First response < 10m, Resolution < 1h
Benefit: Automatically prioritizes and tracks the most impactful issues.
Managing Customer Awaiting Replies:
Policy: 'Customer Wait SLA'
Conditions: Ticket Status is 'Waiting for Customer'
Pause Condition: Pause when Status is 'Waiting for Customer'
Benefit: Prevents SLA breaches when the ball is in the customer's court, maintaining accurate performance data.
Internal Review Delays:
Policy: 'Internal Review Pause'
Conditions: Ticket Status is 'In Internal Review'
Pause Condition: Pause when Status is 'In Internal Review'
Benefit: Accurately reflects your team's performance by pausing the timer during necessary internal handoffs or reviews. Thena's SLA policies give your modern support team the precision tools to manage expectations and provide timely information, no matter what. It's a key part of building a responsive, reliable, and truly human support experience, even with complex workflows.
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