SLA policies
Set response and resolution targets, and understand how business hours change the maths.
What an SLA does here
Every ticket is stamped at creation with two due times:
- First response due — when someone must have replied
- Resolution due — when it must be finished
Both derive from the ticket's priority and your policy. They are stored on the ticket, so changing a policy later does not retroactively rewrite the promises you already made.
Business hours are respected
This is the part most tools get wrong. Targets are calculated in business minutes, not wall-clock minutes.
A four-hour first-response target on a ticket that arrives at 16:30 on a Friday, with hours of Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00, is due at 11:30 on Monday — not 20:30 on Friday. Weekends and holidays are skipped.
Your schedule carries a timezone, so daylight saving transitions are handled correctly rather than drifting by an hour twice a year.
Configuring
SLA configuration lives on your workspace and covers:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Timezone | The zone business hours are interpreted in |
| Days and hours | Open windows per weekday; a day with no window is closed |
| Holidays | Dates treated as fully closed |
| Targets per priority | First-response and resolution minutes |
A workspace with no configured schedule falls back to sensible defaults, so SLA tracking works before you tune anything.
Breach detection
A background job checks due tickets every few minutes and resolves each one's state:
| Outcome | State |
|---|---|
| Agent replied before the target | Met, with the real response time |
| Agent replied after the target | Breached, with the real response time |
| Nobody replied and the target passed | Breached, priority raised, reassigned |
First response is detected from the ticket's messages — the first genuine agent reply. An automated acknowledgement does not count as a response.
Reporting
Met and breached counts feed your support metrics. Track the breach rate rather than the count; a rising count during growth is normal, a rising rate is not.
See Support metrics.
Related