Assignments, Escalations, and SLAs - Unthread

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 Assignment Rules Assignment rules are the primary way 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 Assignment Rules By heading over to “Settings” > “Slack”, you can set up the default assignment rules that will be used for all customers

Per-customer Rules From a customer’s profile, navigate to the “Settings” tab, and you’ll have the ability to set custom assignment rules. This is helpful if you have specific reps or different SLAs for individual customers. Assignment Rule Options When a new conversation is tracked in a channel, assignment rules Click the blue “+” button to add more steps beyond the initial assignment. These subsequent rules will be triggered if there’s no response to the customer within a given time frame. You can set up as many steps as you’d like. We support the following automations if there is no response to the customer within the specified time frame: 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

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”. 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.

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 a “Team Member” (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.