Overview

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are targets that help your team reply, close, and resolve conversations on time. They help you deliver a consistent, high-quality support experience, especially when you have:

• Urgent conversations that should jump the queue

• VIP customers with agreed response times

• High-value leads that Sales should reply to quickly

• Internal goals you want to track (and improve)

SLAs are activated only through workflows, but you can view and manage them from Settings → Support → SLA Policies.

Create a workflow to set SLAs

SLAs are configured inside Workflows. That’s where you decide when and to whom an SLA applies.

1. Create a workflow

First, create a Workflow to control exactly when an SLA is applied and which users it applies to:

1. Start by creating a new Workflow from Automations → Workflows

2. Select a trigger (e.g. Customer opens a new conversation in the Messenger)

3. Set conditional branching to apply different SLAs for different users (optional)

4. Add the ‘Apply SLA’ block to the path where you want the SLA applied

2. Configure the SLA rule

You can now set up individual SLA rules for different customers. For each SLA, you can configure targets like:

• First response time (FRT) - the time it should take a teammate to reply to the first message in a conversation that matches your rule

• Next response time (NRT) - the time it should take a teammate to reply to each subsequent customer reply

• Time to close (TTC) - the total time allowed until the conversation should be closed

You can also choose to pause SLAs when a conversation is snoozed. This prevents SLA breaches while you’re intentionally not working on a conversation (e.g. when waiting on a customer or temporarily setting something aside).

Inbox experience

When an SLA is applied, you’ll see the nearest SLA target directly in the inbox. You’ll also see other SLA details for this conversation in the right-hand sidebar.

The SLA target will continue to count down until you reply. If you haven’t replied within the SLA target, its status will change to red.

SLA indicator colors:

• Red - overdue

• Orange - less than 5 minutes left

• Yellow - less than 15 minutes left

• Grey - more than 15 minutes left

SLAs and office hours

SLAs and office hours work together in Featurebase to ensure timely customer support while respecting your team’s working schedule. SLAs automatically adapt to your configured office hours and holidays, so response targets are measured only when your team is actually available.

• If a customer message arrives outside office hours, the SLA clock effectively starts at the beginning of the next working day.

• If there isn’t enough time left in the current working day to meet an SLA target, the remaining time carries over into the next working day.

This prevents SLAs from being breached while your team is offline.

How office hours affect SLA timers

SLA timers always run in the background, but they’re mapped to your office hours:

• Messages received outside office hours don’t consume SLA time immediately

• If an SLA target can’t be met before office hours end, the timer resumes when office hours start again

• The expected response time shown in the inbox may include nights, weekends, or holidays, depending on your office hours setup

Default office hours settings

• By default, 1 calendar day equals 24 hours.

• If office hours are limited (for example, 9am–5pm, Monday to Friday), calendar time is divided by the number of working hours per day.

  • An 8-hour workday divides a 24-hour SLA day into 3 working days.

• SLAs always reflect your team’s actual availability.

Edit and delete SLAs

You can view all SLAs from Settings → Support → SLA Policies.

Here you can create, edit, and delete all of your SLA policies. However, you can only activate them through workflows.

FAQs