SLAs (Service Level Agreements) help set a target for your team to provide a consistent, high-quality customer experience. By setting SLAs using Workflows, you can provide each customer with the perfect level of support.

SLAs allow you to:

It's only possible to create SLAs in the Workflows builder. You can view all of your SLAs from the Settings > Help Desk > SLAs tab, but you will not be able to create any from there.

First, create a Workflow based on a trigger. If you want the SLA to be added when the conversation or ticket is created, choose the trigger:

You can then create conditional branching to apply an SLA based on rules that you create. This is helpful to apply a faster SLA to your most important customers.
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Clicking on the Apply SLA widget within the Workflow will allow you to:

In addition to the above SLA metrics, you can also:

There is also an SLA time adjustment setting that will enable you to pause SLAs when a conversation/ticket is "snoozed" or "waiting on customer".

These are the supported objects and metrics:

You can set up Workflows that will override current SLAs and apply new SLAs. This functionality would scale for support teams that have a tiered support models particularly useful in scenarios like converting conversations to tickets with the need for new SLAs to be applied.

Once you’ve added all your Workflow settings, you can simply hit Save and set live.

You can pause or delete an SLA Workflow at any time. If you do, the SLA Workflow will stop applying to new conversations. However, it will still apply to conversations that matched the rule before you paused or deleted it.

You can manually remove an SLA by selecting the three dots next to a conversation (in the inbox list of conversations) then click Remove SLA.

When a conversation matches an SLA rule, you’ll see the nearest SLA target in your inbox.

Additionally you can also see other SLA metrics associated with a conversation upon hover in the right sidebar Details.
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When a customer replies to the next message, the SLA target will change to the "next response time" target, if you've set one.

The SLA target will continue to count down until you reply. If you haven’t replied within the SLA target, its status will change to red. Here’s what each SLA indicator means:

You can easily reply to the most urgent SLA targets first, by sorting your inbox by "Next SLA target".

Depending on the options you have chosen for pausing SLAs, you’ll notice the SLAs pause upon "snooze" or "waiting on customer" ticket status.

If you have previously set a Workflow for when a ticket is created → apply SLA and then convert a conversation to a ticket in the inbox, this will result in a new SLA being applied to the ticket.

When a Workflow is matched, and it wants to apply an SLA to a conversation:

Access the SLAs report with combined tickets and conversations reporting readily available. This shows whether an SLA is applied and hit or missed (including overridden SLAs).
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Filter down by specific SLAs or teams to see sliced data, including:

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You can also create custom reports using the SLA metrics & attributes for a more detailed breakdown of your SLAs reporting.

Time to close metric will be helpful when wanting to better manage and measure your operational efficiency, providing data to understand and set agreements on overall handling time of conversations.

This also gives an end to end metric for tickets as well.

Time to resolve for tickets will be relevant to use when considering compliance requirements or agreements with VIP customers, on the time committed to providing a resolution to your customer.
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All SLA metrics are set in calendar hours and will be divided by the office hours you've set, meaning:

Learn more about SLAs and office hours.

If a ticket is moved from "resolved" back to "in progress" and has a time to resolve SLA applied, the timer will resume, and continue counting until the ticket state is once again moved to "resolved".

If a ticket or conversation is moved from "closed" back to "open" and has a time to close SLA applied, the timer will resume, and continue counting until the ticket or conversation is once again "closed".
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If a conversation linked to a ticket is closed without resolving the ticket, the time to resolve will continue running until the ticket state is changed to "resolved".

If you have chosen to pause SLAs on both "waiting on customer" and "snooze" states, the SLA will remain paused until neither of those states apply. For example, if a ticket moves to "in progress" from "waiting on customer", the SLA will continue to be paused until the ticket is unsnoozed.

When you pause an SLA, the SLA will continue to show as "paused" in the inbox, whether you are within or outside of office hours.

No, you can't apply multiple SLAs to the same conversation at once. However, you can link it to a Back-office ticket and you can run parallel SLAs at once - one for your main object [conversation / ticket] and one for your back office ticket.
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No, a breakdown of all the SLAs applied per conversation is currently not supported.
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A new SLA that is different to the SLA already applied (such as SLA 1 vs SLA 2), will completely override SLA 1. It won't add the elapsed time from SLA 1 to SLA 2, instead it will start from the most recent user message (which may be different to SLA 1's trigger message).

For example 👇

The SLA timer would restart from the second user message at 20:30 and this would be used to measure the response time.

However, if the same SLA is applied (e.g. SLA 1 is originally applied, and then a rule re-applies SLA 1) the countdown won't restart, it adds the elapsed time from the previous SLA to the current SLA.

For example 👇

The SLA timer would add the elapsed time from when SLA 1 was triggered on the first user message at 19:07 and this would be used to measure the response time.

Yes, when a teammate sends a message when a ticket state is "waiting on customer", the countdown will continue to be paused until the customer replies.

Currently, it's not possible to edit an SLA directly. You would need to archive/delete the SLA and create a new one. Here's a help article that can show you how to delete the old SLAs.