SLA and business hours
Set up business hours calendars, an out-of-hours message and SLA policies, understand how the timers run, and read the desk dashboard.
Service level agreements (SLAs) set how quickly your team should respond to and resolve tickets. Times are counted in business minutes, so they only run while your business hours calendar says you are open. This page covers calendars, the out-of-hours message, SLA policies, how timers behave, and the desk dashboard.
Go to Desk → Admin → SLA policies or Desk → Admin → Business hours, next to Routing rules. One set of permissions covers both (see Permissions).
Business hours calendars
In Business hours, select Add calendar. A calendar describes when your team is available. Each row has Edit and Delete.
- Name — unique in the workspace, ignoring capitalization.
- Time zone — an IANA time zone such as
Europe/London. - Opening hours — for each weekday, up to 6 opening ranges. A range of 00:00–00:00 means open all day. A day with no range is closed.
- Holidays — dates on which you are closed all day.
You can't delete a calendar while an SLA policy or the workspace settings use it. Switch those to another calendar first.
Out-of-hours message
Go to Desk → Admin → Organization (see Organization settings). Choose the workspace's calendar under Business hours and write the Out-of-hours message. Outside business hours, the customer chat shows that message. The chat still accepts messages, which are handled as usual once you are open.
SLA policies
In SLA policies, select Add policy. If you have no calendar yet, the page says Add a business-hours calendar first. Policies are an ordered list. For each ticket, the first policy from the top whose conditions match applies; later policies are not looked at. Put specific policies above general ones.
The editor has a Name and these settings.
Conditions — at least one is required:
- Priority is / is not a value.
- Group is / is not a group.
Calendar — each policy uses one calendar.
Targets are in business minutes. Leave a target blank for no target.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| First response target (minutes) | Time until the first public staff reply |
| Next response target (minutes) | Time to answer a customer who wrote again |
| Resolution target (minutes) | Time until the ticket is resolved or closed |
Warn at (percent of target) — 50–99 %, default 80 %. When a ticket reaches it, it is flagged as at risk before it breaches.
There is no drag-and-drop. Use Move up and Move down on a row to change the order. Edit and Delete are on each row too.
Editing a policy or a calendar recalculates the due times of open tickets.
How the timers run
| Timer | Starts | Stops |
|---|---|---|
| First response | When the ticket is created | The first public staff reply. Internal notes don't count |
| Next response | The first customer message after a staff reply | The next public staff reply |
| Resolution | When the ticket is created | The ticket is resolved or closed |
Details that surprise people:
- Timers start at creation, so time spent in Ungrouped counts.
- The pending states (Pending (reminder) and Pending (auto-close)) pause the resolution timer only. Response timers keep running.
- If a ticket is reopened, resolution time counts from creation again.
Warnings and breaches
A warning and a breach each happen once per target per ticket.
- The ticket's owner is notified. With no owner, everyone who can view the ticket's group is notified.
- Warning and breached tickets appear in the default Escalated view.
- The ticket shows the time remaining.
- Breaches count on the dashboard.
Dashboard
The desk dashboard shows live counts:
- open, ungrouped, unassigned, waiting on customer, waiting on support, urgent, and SLA breaches
- created today and resolved today
- average first-response and resolution times over the last 7 days
- customer satisfaction: the average rating from the last 7 days (see Customer profile and satisfaction)
Only tickets the viewer can access are counted, so two people can see different numbers (see Roles and groups). The dashboard needs the dashboard permission.
Permissions
sla_policy.view, sla_policy.create, sla_policy.edit and
sla_policy.delete cover both policies and business hours calendars. Admin
has all of them.
Troubleshooting
- A ticket has no SLA. No policy matched it. Check the order and conditions of your policies.
- Can't delete a calendar. A policy or the workspace settings still use it.
- Times look wrong after an edit. Open tickets are recalculated; reload the ticket.
- Resolution time keeps growing while pending. Only Pending (reminder) and Pending (auto-close) pause it. Other states don't.
Automation rules
Let rules change tickets, reply to customers and notify people when tickets are created, updated or answered, or after they have waited a set time, without rules looping on each other.
Audit log and data retention
Review who changed what in your workspace, and choose how long closed tickets and the audit log are kept before they are deleted for good.