SLA policies and business-hours calendars

Desk's SLA engine fires every five minutes against open tickets. Setting policies is fast; getting the calendar right is what saves you from false breach alerts.

Creating an SLA policy

Settings → SLA → New policy. Each policy has:

• First-response SLA — target time from ticket creation to first agent reply.
• Resolution SLA — target time from creation to resolved status.
• Conditions — which tickets the policy applies to (priority, channel, customer tier, tag).
• Calendar — business-hours window the SLA clock runs against.

Business-hours calendars

Settings → SLA → Calendars. Define a calendar with:

• Working days (typically Mon-Fri or Sun-Thu)
• Working hours per day (defaults: 9am-6pm in the calendar's timezone)
• Holidays — local public holidays + your company-specific days off
• Timezone

The SLA clock pauses outside business hours and on holidays. A ticket opened Friday evening doesn't tick down through the weekend.

Per-region calendars

If you support customers in multiple timezones, create one calendar per region and attach the right calendar to each SLA policy via tag-based conditions. The SLA engine matches the right calendar at run time.

Breach behavior

When a ticket crosses its SLA, three things fire:

1. The assigned agent + their manager get a notification (in-app, email, Slack — configurable).
2. The breach is captured in the analytics layer; QBR reports include it.
3. Optional escalation rules can re-assign or change priority.

Predicting breaches before they happen

Pro and Enterprise plans get breach prediction — the engine flags tickets at risk of breaching ~30 minutes before the deadline based on historical patterns. The agent gets a heads-up; the manager can re-assign proactively.