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What is the SLA System?

Service Level Agreements track response and resolution time commitments visually and in real time. Conversations climb through four risk states — SLA, At risk, Urgent, Breach — driving urgency, visibility, and automation hooks for escalation.

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What is the SLA System?

Service Level Agreements in Atender provide visual, real-time tracking of the response and resolution time commitments your team makes to customers. SLAs create urgency where it’s needed and ensure no conversation falls through the cracks.

An SLA is two things working together: a policy that defines how fast you’ll respond (configured in Settings), and a timer that runs against that policy on every conversation it applies to (visible in the inbox).

Four risk states

Every conversation with an active SLA policy moves through four risk states, with escalating visual urgency:

  • SLA — Green — Policy is active, plenty of time remaining
  • At risk — Yellow — First threshold crossed — needs attention soon
  • Urgent — Red — Last threshold before breach — immediate action
  • Breach — Red, overdue — SLA violated — timer flips to count up

These badges appear in the conversation list, on the conversation detail header, and in Analytics dashboards. An agent scanning their inbox sees risk state at a glance.

Escalation is one-way. Status only climbs — SLA → At risk → Urgent → Breach. It never walks back down inside a single conversation, even if the timer pauses or you respond. Closing the conversation is the only reset.

Three metric types

A policy can track one or more of these metrics in parallel:

  • First Reply Time — from the customer’s first message to the agent’s first reply
  • All Messages — to any customer message, ongoing through the conversation
  • Resolution Time — total time from creation to resolution

A typical setup tracks First Reply (because first impressions matter) and Resolution (because customers want their issue closed).

Office hours

By default, SLA timers only count during your team’s opening hours. A conversation that arrives at 5pm on Friday doesn’t start breaching at 5:01pm — the timer pauses until Monday morning. Calculations are timezone-aware and respect holiday country codes and date overrides.

You can flip a policy to ignore office hours for 24/7 SLAs (critical tiers, monitored channels, after-hours teams). See Run an SLA 24/7.

Channel and team scoping

A policy applies to conversations through an assignment. Each assignment can specify a team, a channel, or both. The most specific match per metric type wins:

  • Team + channel — 3 — Highest specificity — beats everything else
  • Team only — 2 — Used when no team+channel match exists
  • Channel only — 1 — Fallback when only the channel matches

This lets you set a default “Email = 4 hours” policy and override it per team without duplicating the policy.

Automation hooks

SLAs are programmable signals, not just visual. Two Automation triggers fire as the scheduler reclassifies risk:

  • SLA at risk — fires when status escalates to At risk or Urgent
  • SLA breached — fires when status reaches Breach

Wire these to escalate to a manager, ping Slack, reassign to a senior agent, or anything else that needs to happen when an SLA tips. See the SLA escalation automation recipe.

Where to start

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