Alerts & SLAs

What is an Alert?

Customer communication on Slack can be challenging. Often, your teams struggle with keeping track of conversations.

Alerts are smart messages you can schedule or are triggered based on important events. Alerts can be configured to reach you in Slack(either in the Thena Slack App, or a specific channel). Use Alerts to stay organized, save time and automate away repetitive tasks and follow ups.

Here are some examples of how Alerts helps you in your day to day customer communication:

A customer sends a message but you forget to respond.
- The First Response SLA alert will notify you of a pending customer response.
A customer asked you a question, but you did not notice.
- The alert for a request detected will be sent to you on the channel of your choice.

Types of Alerts

Request Detected

To keep track of customer requests, the request detection (or alert) feature was introduced.

Whenever a customer request is detected, an alert will be sent on a channel of your choice. This will ensure that you never miss a customer message. You can centralize all requests, or segment them based on your size & current strategy. At Thena we segment by Customers, Prospects, and Partners!

The automation works in the following way:

A customer reaches out to the vendor (you) with a question.
Thena uses request detection to determine if that message was indeed qualified to be a request. This involves our own AI as well as OpenAI's learning models.
Identify whether the vendor (you) has set up alerts. If set up, Thena sends an alert with the request to the relevant channel. In most cases this will be your triage channel.

For more information on how to set up alerting, read this documentation . Alerting can be set up from the Thena Web app as well.

We allow users to create a ticket, assign it to others/themselves, or mark the request as closed. More information can be found by reading the Request Management documentation.

Next Steps after getting the alert

After receiving a alert for request detected, you can:

Create a Ticket - Take an incoming request and turn it into a ticket that lives in your organizations ticketing platform of choice. More on that here.
Assign it to Yourself - Take ownership of the incoming request, and notify your workspace that you are responsible for next steps and follow ups for that specific request.
Assign to Someone Else - Pass on ownership to the correct individual/party, and notify your workspace & that individual that they are now responsible for next steps and follow ups.
Close the Request - If your team has subsequently resolved the customer's request. You can close it out in Thena.
Discard the Request - If you feel the request was caught in error, you can discard. In which case Thena is trained to ignore related requests in the future.

For more information you can read one of the following, depending on the surface area you are working from: The Thena Web App, The Slack App, or The Triage Channel.

This will then be highlighted in the 'My Summary' section. To see all requests assigned to you, simply type /my summary and press enter.

First Response SLA

Our customers wanted the ability to be alerted whenever there was a message from a Customer that was not replied to within a pre-configured time duration (SLA).

Now, you can create an alert, that will be sent to a channel of your choice, whenever you have missed responding to a Customer message. We support an SLA from 0.5 hrs up to 48 hrs.

Here is what a sample alert looks like within the #internal-thena-customers channel.

How to Set Up

Alerts & SLAs can be set up from both the Thena Web App or the Thena Slack App. The settings are customizable at the global level or at the individual channel level. More on that here and here.

Ticket Closure SLA

Often, the transparency into which Requests have been open for a while, and breached the SLA standards set by your organization (or per customer) is lacking. Now, you can create an alert, that will be sent to a channel of your choice, whenever a Customer Request has Breached SLA for resolution time.

Things to keep in mind

Slack will unfurl the message information only for public channels. If a suggested request has been detected on a private channel, Slack will not unfurl it to cater to permissions.