SLA Policies Where response and resolution deadlines come from, and how to set them honestly.

Every ticket carries two deadlines: a first response and a resolution. Both come from your SLA policy rather than being fixed by the platform.

What a policy varies by

Severity, so a critical outage and a low-priority question are not on the same clock.

Customer tier, so accounts with different agreements get different targets.

That combination is the point. A single deadline across all tickets either strangles the team on routine questions or lets genuine emergencies sit.

Setting them

Give each combination a first response target and a resolution target. The clock starts when the ticket arrives and pauses while a ticket is Waiting on the customer.

The honest part

Set targets you will actually meet, not targets that sound good.

An SLA the team misses most of the time stops functioning as a deadline and becomes background noise. The breach count is only useful while a breach is unusual enough to prompt someone to act. Once most of the queue is breaching, the number tells you nothing and people stop looking at it.

If your current targets are producing constant breaches, the useful response is usually to change the target rather than to work faster. A target you meet 90% of the time is worth more than an aspirational one you meet a third of the time, because only the first one tells you when something is wrong.