Reply SLAs set clear response and resolution expectations for your team. Give each inbox its own SLA — a fast promise for WhatsApp, a relaxed one for email — or one SLA for all inboxes. An SLA is applied to open conversations automatically, and a breach is recorded whenever a customer waits longer than a threshold.
Watch the walkthrough
Creating an SLA
- Open Settings → Reply SLA and click Add SLA.
- Enter an SLA Name and, optionally, a Description.
- Choose which inboxes it covers (see Choosing the inboxes below).
- Set the thresholds you want to track:
- First Response Time — how quickly the first reply must go out.
- Next Response Time — how quickly every later customer message must be answered.
- Resolution Time — how quickly the conversation must be resolved.
- Adjust the optional settings described below, then click Create.
To change an SLA later, click Edit on its row, make your changes and click Save.
Choosing the inboxes
Every SLA either covers all inboxes or only the inboxes you pick:
- Keep Apply to all inboxes on to use the SLA as your default.
- Turn it off and pick the inboxes under Inboxes to give those inboxes their own targets.
How your SLAs share the inboxes:
- Add as many SLAs as you need, but each inbox belongs to one SLA at most. Inboxes already covered by another SLA are not listed in the picker.
- Only one SLA can apply to all inboxes. It covers every inbox that no other SLA has claimed.
- Without an all-inboxes SLA, an inbox left out of every SLA is not measured.
- The Inboxes column in the list shows which inboxes each SLA covers.
- Changes apply to newly tracked conversations. A conversation an SLA is already tracking keeps that SLA.
Counting only business hours
Turn on Only during business hours and the countdowns pause outside each inbox’s working hours, so a message that arrives in the evening doesn’t breach overnight.
- First response, next response and resolution countdowns all run only inside the inbox’s working hours. A message at 8:30pm on a 2-hour SLA breaches 2 working hours after the next opening.
- With the toggle on, the form lists the business hours of each inbox the SLA covers. Click Set hours or Edit next to an inbox to set its timezone and weekly schedule right there, then click Save hours.
- Hours you set here are saved to the inbox itself, so the inbox’s Business Hours tab shows the same schedule.
- An inbox without working hours is still measured around the clock.
- An inbox that never picked a timezone follows the account’s timezone.
Excluded keywords
Some customer messages don’t need a reply deadline — forwarded system notifications, messages relayed on behalf of your own staff, or anything tagged with an internal reference code. List those words under Excluded keywords: type a keyword and press Enter, and repeat for each one.
- A customer message containing any of the keywords never starts the reply countdown. The countdown is measured from the first customer message that doesn’t contain one.
- Keywords match anywhere in the message, ignoring upper and lower case.
- A countdown that is already running is not affected by an excluded message.
- Reply-time reports follow the same rule, and a wait made up only of excluded messages is not measured at all.
- Each SLA keeps its own list.
Ignoring emoji reactions
In busy chats, people often acknowledge a message with a ✅ or 👍 reaction. Under Reactions, turn on Ignore emoji reactions and reactions no longer count as customer messages for the SLA.
- A reaction never starts the reply countdown, and never starts a new round after a missed deadline.
- Typed messages still count, even when they are a single emoji.
- The setting is off by default, and each SLA has its own.
Reassigning on a missed deadline
Turn on Auto-reassign on missed reply deadline and, when a Next Response Time is missed, the conversation is handed to another online agent in the inbox. The countdown then starts again for the new agent. If no other agent is online, the conversation stays with its current agent.
When a reply deadline is missed
Once a Next Response Time is missed, the customer’s next message starts a fresh countdown, so a conversation that stays unanswered keeps escalating instead of going quiet. There’s nothing to switch on — every Reply SLA works this way.
- The new countdown runs the full Next Response Time again from the customer’s follow-up message.
- Every missed deadline records its own breach and notifies the assigned agent, the conversation’s participants and the account administrators — so if the new round is missed too, they are notified again.
- The SLA’s breach automation runs again for each missed round (see below).
- A message containing one of the Excluded keywords neither closes a round nor starts a new one.
- The waiting time of a missed round still counts in reply-time reports, against the assigned agent.
Running an automation on a breach
Each SLA can have one automation rule that acts the moment a customer waits past your deadline — reassign the chat, raise its priority, alert a team, or notify your own systems.
- Save the SLA first, then open it with Edit.
- Next to Run automations when this SLA is breached, click Create automation. The rule opens with Reply SLA Breached already set as its event. The lightning button on the SLA’s row does the same.
- Add conditions and actions, then click Create.
Good to know:
- Actions include Assign to Agent, Assign a Team, Change Priority, Add a Label, Send an Email to Team, Send a Message, Add a Private Note, Send Webhook Event and Sync lead to Google Sheets.
- The rule runs each time a breach is recorded — first response, next response or resolution time — while the conversation is open.
- Each SLA has one breach automation. To change it, click Edit automation in the SLA form, or the Edit breach automation button on the SLA’s row.
- The breach automation belongs to its SLA: its event can’t be changed and it can’t be cloned. Deleting the SLA also deletes its breach automation.
Tracking performance
Track how the team performs against your SLAs in Reports → SLA — see CSAT and SLA reports.