SLAs and Timers

Set differentiated service level agreement timers on customer issues.

SLAs (AKA Service Level Agreements) are rules for how quickly you want to respond to and resolve customer issues.

Pylon supports four types of issue SLAs:

1. First Response Time: how quickly someone on your team should respond to an initial message or request from the customer.

2. Next Response Time: how quickly someone on your team should respond to each subsequent message in a customer request after the first.

3. Follow Up Time: how quickly it takes your team to send the next customer-facing update after your team was the last to reply.

4. Resolution Time: how long it takes to resolve a request after it’s been started (more often called Time to Resolution).

Pylon also tracks active time — how long teammates actually spend working an issue. It has no target and cannot breach, so it is not an SLA, but it appears alongside the SLA timers on the issue and shares their counting settings.

​Setup

1. Visit the SLAs page and hit Create

2. Select from one of the available templates for common SLA configurations for a good starting point

1. Modify the trigger with the conditions and values that make sense for your business. SLAs can be applied based on many factors, including the priority of the issue, the type of customer who raised it, etc.

Notification

To setup notifications for SLAs, choose the "Send Slack notification on SLA breaches" template. Update the channel to your preferred one, or the action to a different notification type (such as email).

When an issue violates an SLA

1. The configured action will be taken, for example notifying a Slack channel

2. Users can also subscribe to notifications for SLA breaches on issues they are assigned to on the notifications page.

Support Hours

If you want SLAs to only increment during your working hours, you can configure Support Hours on the Settings Page. This makes sure that weekends and evenings will not inflate your count of SLA breaches.

Team SLAs

Team SLAs allow setting SLAs on how long a team is assigned to an issue. These run independently from issue SLAs. Team SLAs are visible in analytics and can be created via trigger templates.

SLAs vs Team SLAs

The key benefit is that Team SLAs only start ticking when the issue is assigned to that specific team, whereas SLAs start from issue creation. This prevents situations where, for ex. a sales team holds an issue for a week before passing it to support, and then support gets penalized for the entire week plus their response time.

SLAs should be used when:

• You want to measure the overall customer experience from issue creation to resolution.

Team SLAs should be used when:

• You want to measure individual team performance separately from the overall customer experience.

Active Time

Active time measures hands-on effort per person, per issue, rather than elapsed time. It is configured in the same place as SLA counting — Settings → SLAs → Counting — and appears in the SLAs sidebar module on every issue. See Active Time for the full behavior.