A Service Level Agreement (SLA) in Zoho Desk defines how quickly your team must respond to and resolve customer tickets, setting measurable standards for performance and keeping agents accountable, while also acting as a genuine promise to customers that you value their time.
Setting Up an SLA Policy
- Go to Setup, then Automation, then SLAs.
- Create a new policy and choose which Department it applies to, since each department can have its own distinct SLA rules.
- Set criteria to determine which tickets the policy applies to, such as priority, ticket type, or channel.
- Define your first response time and resolution time targets.
Once a ticket is created, Zoho Desk automatically applies whichever SLA policy matches its criteria. Targets are calculated against your organisation's actual configured business hours and holiday list, rather than a flat 24-hour clock, so an SLA genuinely reflects when your team is actually working.
What You See on a Ticket
- A countdown timer showing how much time remains before the SLA is breached
- Notifications and reminders as a deadline approaches
- Reports showing your overall SLA compliance rate, useful for tracking team performance over time
Escalation Rules
Even with SLAs in place, tickets can still get overlooked. Escalation Rules automatically alert a supervisor or reassign a ticket when an SLA is about to be, or has already been, breached.
- From your SLA policy, choose to add an escalation.
- Choose when it should trigger, such as 30 minutes before a breach, or immediately upon one.
- Select who should be notified or have the ticket reassigned to them.
Escalation levels: Escalations support up to four levels of hierarchy for genuinely overdue tickets. Note that Response Escalations and Resolution Escalations can have a different number of available levels from each other; if you're expecting the same count for both and seeing fewer for Response specifically, this is a known distinction rather than a fault.
For a related feature, Support Contracts let you set a customisable commencement and expiry date for a customer's support agreement, with alerts as expiry approaches, useful for tracking which customers currently have active paid support. Contracts and SLAs are separate, complementary features.
Need help? 1 Cloud Consultants can help you design SLA policies and escalation rules that genuinely reflect your team's business hours and customer commitments.
Book a discovery call with 1 Cloud Consultants.