A commitment to respond to or resolve tickets within a set time, usually varying by priority. Support SLAs are measured against business hours and flip to “at-risk” or “breached” as deadlines approach.
An SLA turns a vague “we’ll get back to you” into a measurable promise. The most useful ones are tied to business hours so the clock reflects when agents are actually working. See setting SLAs your team can hit.
Why it matters
Without a target, urgent and trivial tickets compete for the same attention and the slowest cases quietly rot at the bottom of the queue. An SLA gives the team a shared definition of “late,” so prioritisation stops being a matter of who shouts loudest. It also sets a fair expectation with the customer: a clear deadline beats an open-ended wait, even when the deadline is measured in days.
How it works
Most SLAs cover two distinct clocks: first response time — how long until a human replies — and resolution time — how long until the issue is closed. Targets usually vary by priority, so an urgent outage might carry a one-hour response target while a routine question gets a day. The clock runs against business hours, pauses when you’re waiting on the customer, and resumes when they reply. As a deadline nears, the ticket is flagged at-risk; once the deadline passes, it is breached.
A worked example
Say a SaaS support desk sets a 4-hour first-response target for high-priority tickets, on business hours of 9am–6pm. A ticket arriving at 5pm has until 11am the next working day, not 9pm that evening. If an agent replies at 10:30am it’s met; if the first reply waits until lunch, it’s breached — and that single number, tracked over hundreds of tickets, tells you whether staffing matches demand.
Common pitfalls
- Measuring against the wall clock instead of business hours, so every overnight ticket breaches unfairly.
- Setting targets so aggressive the team games them — sending an empty holding reply just to stop the response clock.
- Forgetting to pause the clock while you’re blocked waiting on the customer.
- One SLA for everything, instead of letting priority drive the target.
How Cherryrise handles it
Cherryrise lets you define response and resolution targets per priority, ties them to your configured business hours, and surfaces at-risk and breached tickets in saved views and the SLA dashboard. Its automation rules can escalate or reassign a ticket before the deadline lands rather than after.