SLA’s & Entitlement – Customer Service in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has new features including Entitlement and Service Level Agreements or SLA’s – well how does it help you to improve customer service? Here is an example (use case).

Use Case scenario – You have many different types of customers and have 3 types of service offering options you provide to them. They are differentiated as below

We will make use of the SLA’s and Entitlements feature to enable the above differentiated service offerings. Our goal is to make sure the customers get the right kind of service at the right time.

Let’s measure our goal by defining the KPI’s (key performance indicators) for this as -

• Minimum # of cases with SLAs not met by service plan per month
• Least possible First response time by service plan per month

Step # 1 – Create a new global option set field to for the Service plans offered to the customer.

Add the field to the Account form so the service level can be assigned to the account.

Step # 2 – Create the schedules

Now before we jump into the SLA we need to create the Holiday schedule and the customer service schedule.

• Go to settings > service management > holiday schedule and create the holidays that you observe (support will not be available).
• Go to settings > service management > customer service schedule and create the different schedules. This is important to track the support hours and response time for SLA’s.

Here is an example of the Silver support schedule –

Step # 3 – Create the SLA

Now you can create the SLA. Go to settings > service management > SLA

1. Enter a name for the SLA
2. Select the applicable “from” option – Choose the case field that specifies the date and time from which the SLA items will be calculated. For example, if you choose the Case Created On field, the calculations for service level agreements will start “from” the time the case is created.
3. Business Hours. Choose a customer service schedule record created above that defines your support organization’s business hours. This is useful in the SLA time-tracking calculations.
4. Save the SLA.
5. Now create a SLA item detail/s to enter the specified KPI success criteria and follow-up actions.

• In our example of a Gold support the SLA is only applicable when the customer has a Gold service plan.
• The SLA success criteria is met when the first response is sent.
• SLA Failure is defined as when the first response is not sent within 4 hours from the case creation time.
• In case of failure the case is escalated.
• A warning is triggered when 3.5 hours has passed since the case creation.
• An email is sent to the case owner.The SLA is attached to an entitlement which is assigned to the customer or can be set as a default SLA for all customers. In our case we will attach it to an entitlement.

6.  The SLA is attached to an entitlement which is assigned to the customer or can be set as a default SLA for all customers. In our case we will attach it to an entitlement.

Step # 4 – Entitlements

An entitlement defines the service level offerings for a particular customer as below -

• Eligible level of support and the time period of support contract
• Allocation by # of hours of support OR # of cases available to use
• The type of SLA
• The available channel/s of support (web, email, phone etc.)
• Support on specific products only
• Support to specific contact/s only

To create an entitlement, go to settings > service management > entitlements

In our example for a Customer who has Bronze level support the entitlements are

Step # 5 – Assign the entitlement to a case.

When a case is created for the customer you can select the customer entitlement/s. Select the applicable entitlement and attach it to the case. In my next blog I will write about the Timer which can be used to calculate the time remaining on a case.

Here is the example of the case with entitlement assigned. As soon as the case was created the # of remaining cases in the entitlement decreased from 10 to 9.

The above can be further enhanced with custom workflows and more creative case routing.