SLA & Business Hours
SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are the response and resolution targets your team commits to. Business hours are when those targets apply. Together they give you a fair, automated way to measure performance without penalizing teams for being offline at 3 AM.
SLA basics
Every conversation and ticket has two SLA timers:
| Timer | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Time to first response | From conversation creation to the first non-bot agent reply. |
| Time to resolution | From conversation creation to status Resolved. |
Targets are set per priority and channel:
| Priority | First response target | Resolution target |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent | 15 minutes | 2 hours |
| High | 1 hour | 4 hours |
| Normal | 4 hours | 1 business day |
| Low | 1 business day | 3 business days |
Define an SLA policy
- Settings → SLA → New policy.
- Name the policy.
- Set first-response and resolution targets per priority.
- Pick which channels it applies to.
- Optionally scope by team, language, or customer tier.
- Save.
You can have multiple policies — Standard SLA, Gold customer SLA, Enterprise SLA — and routing rules pick which applies.
Business hours
A business hours definition pairs a timezone with a weekly schedule:
EMEA support
Timezone: Europe/Berlin
Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00
Sat–Sun closed
Holidays: Germany public holidaysMultiple business hours definitions can coexist — EMEA support, APAC support, Always-on Pager.
When an SLA is calculated against a business-hours-aware policy, the timer pauses outside hours and resumes when hours start again.
An SLA can be 24/7 (no business hours pause) or business-hours-aware. Most teams keep urgent and high priorities at 24/7 and normal/low priorities on business hours.
Holidays
Each business hours definition has a holiday calendar:
- Built-in calendars for major countries.
- Custom holidays you can add (e.g. company-wide all-hands days).
- Country-pack updates push automatically each January.
Breach behavior
When an SLA target is at risk or breached, Omniflow can:
- Notify the assignee.
- Notify the supervisor.
- Escalate priority automatically.
- Reassign to a different team.
- Post to Slack.
- Tag the conversation.
Configure under Settings → SLA → Escalation rules.
After-hours behavior
When a conversation arrives outside business hours, you have options:
| Option | When |
|---|---|
| Auto-acknowledge | Send a templated message — “We’ve received your message and will respond at 9 AM.” |
| Route to AI agent | The AI handles routine questions; escalates to humans when hours start. |
| Voicemail / fallback channel | Voice calls fall through to voicemail; chats go to a queue. |
| Page on-call | For urgent priority, ping a Slack channel or PagerDuty. |
Don’t set a 1-hour SLA on a team with no after-hours coverage. It’ll breach overnight every time and drown your dashboards in noise. Use business-hours-aware SLAs or 24/7 staffing — pick one.
Reporting
The SLA report shows:
- Per-team breach rates and trends.
- Per-priority median time to first response.
- Per-channel resolution distributions.
- Specific breached conversations for triage.
Use it weekly. Patterns of breach point at staffing gaps, missing automation, or unrealistic targets.
Open in Omniflow
Related
| If you want to… | Go to |
|---|---|
| Get notified on breach | Notifications |
| Route by tier | Routing Rules |
| Build the SLA report | Reports & Trends |