SLA policies and business hours

SLA (Service Level Agreement) policies define how quickly your team must respond to tickets — first-response and resolution — with timers that pause outside business hours and escalate when breach is imminent.

Available on Business and above.

Concepts

• First-response SLA — time from ticket arrival to the first human reply
• Resolution SLA — time from ticket arrival to ticket resolved (not closed, but marked resolved)
• Business hours — time windows when the clock ticks (e.g., Mon-Fri 9am-6pm)
• Breach — a timer exceeds its target
• Warning threshold — percentage of SLA remaining when we fire a warning (default 20%)

SLAs always run on tickets once they have a priority. Triage sets priority automatically for most tickets. Unprioritized tickets use the workspace default priority (Settings → General → Default priority).

Creating a policy

Settings → SLA → "New policy":

1. Name the policy (e.g., "Standard response")
2. Pick who it applies to: all tickets, tickets on a specific team, tickets with specific labels, tickets from VIP customers
3. Set first-response targets per priority:
   • Urgent: e.g., 30 minutes
   • High: 2 hours
   • Normal: 8 business hours
   • Low: 24 business hours
4. Set resolution targets per priority (typically 4-10× the first-response target)
5. Select business hours (workspace default or per-team)
6. Set the warning threshold (default 20% of SLA remaining)

Policies apply in priority order — more specific policies win over general ones. If a ticket matches two policies, the team-scoped one wins over the workspace-wide one.

Business hours

Settings → General → Business hours (workspace-wide) or Settings → Teams → team → Business hours (per-team).

• Days and times per weekday (e.g., Mon-Fri 9:00-18:00)
• Timezone — tied to workspace or team
• Holidays — pick from a preset country calendar or add custom dates

When business hours are off, SLA timers pause. If a ticket arrives at 8 PM on Friday with an 8-hour SLA, the clock won't start until Monday at 9 AM, giving agents until Tuesday 5 PM.

This is critical — don't skip business hours. Without them, your SLA timers run 24/7 and your weekend tickets will breach before Monday morning.

Warnings and escalations

When a ticket hits the warning threshold (default 20% of SLA remaining):

• Visual warning — the ticket shows a yellow SLA badge
• Slack notification — if Slack integration is set up, the ticket lead gets a DM
• Email notification — the assigned agent (or team lead if unassigned) gets an email
• Auto-reassignment (optional) — escalate to a team lead or senior agent

Configurable per policy in Settings → SLA → policy → Escalation.

Breach

If the SLA timer reaches zero:

• Ticket badge turns red
• The policy's configured escalation path fires (Slack + email + reassignment if configured)
• Breach is logged in the ticket timeline for reporting
• Ticket is included in the "Breached" filter in the inbox

Breaches are rarely catastrophic — they're signals. Your goal is zero breaches, but an occasional one just means you need more coverage during that time window.

Reporting

Settings → Reports → SLA:

• Breach rate by priority
• Breach rate by team
• Average first-response and resolution times
• Historical trends (weekly / monthly)

Business+ gets basic reports; Enterprise adds custom SLA dashboards and per-customer SLA tracking.

Common patterns

• Two policies, one for VIPs: VIPs get a stricter policy (e.g., 15-minute first-response), everyone else gets the standard.
• Separate business hours per team: Billing team Mon-Fri 9-5 in EST; Technical team 24/5 rotating shifts.
• Holiday handling: Add your country's holidays to business hours. Don't make customers' Christmas your breach.
• Paused tickets: When a ticket is snoozed (waiting on customer), SLA timers pause automatically. Snooze judiciously; don't use it to dodge breaches.

Summary

• First-response + resolution SLAs per priority
• Business-hours-aware pausing
• Warnings at 20% remaining, breaches on zero
• Business plan and above