Can I use email to meet a 15 minute response requirement?

Environment:

Incoming E-mail, techmail utility
Oracle B2C Service, All versions

Resolution:

Although we often think of email as being instantaneous, email messages are commonly delayed as they travel across the Internet sometimes hours or even days.  Therefore our product calculates Service Level Agreements (SLAs) from the time an email is pulled by techmail and an incident is created or updated. There is no way to calculate an SLA from when an email is sent.

An email travels across many servers to arrive at its destination and the load and responsiveness of each can affect the travel time.  Therefore email simply cannot be relied on to be delivered in a set amount of time. 

To expedite email processing, we recommend that you set up Oracle-managed mailboxes (see Answer ID 331: Setting up mailboxes in Oracle B2C Service), which utilize Techmail On-Demand for processing a message near real time. While we still cannot control delays that may occur from customer mail servers to ours, once the email is received, we will turn that into an incident (or update an incident) with a subsequent run of techmail. Because this run is automatically triggered by the incoming message, in some cases, it may greatly decrease the wait time as opposed to the normal schedule.

We suggest that if you have a hard requirement to respond to a customer in a very short period of time, such as 5 minutes, that you do not use email as a support channel. Phone or chat will allow a customer to be in contact with an agent immediately.  Although the Ask a Question page will update an incident immediately, you would have to set up screen pops or some other real time customization to be informed of the update.

Techmail is the utility that processes incoming e-mails. For more information on this utility, refer to Answer ID 1361: What are techmail considerations I need to know?