SLA Policies
Service level agreements (SLAs) set clear expectations for how quickly your team responds to and resolves conversations. When an SLA target is at risk of being missed, the system alerts the right people so nothing falls through the cracks.
SLA target types
Each SLA policy contains one or more targets. A target defines a specific milestone to measure. There are three built-in target types:
- First Response Time — measures how quickly a human agent sends their first reply after a conversation is escalated. Use this to ensure customers are never left waiting without acknowledgment.
- Resolution Time — measures how long it takes to fully close a conversation from the moment escalation begins. Use this to track end-to-end handling speed.
- Custom — define your own milestone with any start, completion, and cancel trigger you choose. Use this for team-specific workflows that do not fit the standard patterns above.
Configuring an SLA policy
When you create or edit an SLA policy, you configure the following for each target:
Start trigger — the event that starts the SLA clock. For example, the clock can begin when a conversation is escalated, when the first message arrives, or when a custom condition is met.
Completion trigger — the event that stops the clock and marks the target as met. For example, the clock can stop when the agent sends their first reply (for first response time) or when the conversation is resolved.
Cancel trigger — an event that cancels the SLA entirely without marking it as breached. For example, if a conversation is resolved by the AI before a human ever responds, you may want to cancel the first response target rather than record a breach.
Business hours only — when enabled, the SLA clock only counts time during your configured operating hours. Hours outside your schedule — including weekends and holidays — are excluded from the calculation. This setting is useful when your team does not provide 24/7 support.
Breach notification — configure who is notified when an SLA is about to breach or has already breached. You can send alerts by email and route them to specific agent groups.
SLA tracker states
Once an SLA clock starts, each target is tracked individually. You can see the current state of any tracker in the conversation view:
- Active — the clock is running and the target has not yet been reached or missed.
- Breached — the deadline passed before the completion trigger fired. A breach notification was sent if one was configured.
- Completed — the completion trigger fired before the deadline. The target was met on time.
- Cancelled — the cancel trigger fired before completion or breach. The target was abandoned without being counted as missed.
Filtering conversations by SLA status
In your inbox views, you can filter conversations by SLA state to surface the most urgent items. Sorting by SLA urgency brings conversations closest to breaching to the top of the list.
Next steps
- Control how escalated conversations are distributed in Routing
- Customize what appears in your queue with Inbox Views