Risk states reference
Every conversation with an active SLA policy moves through one or more risk states. This reference covers what each state means, how a conversation gets there, and what happens at the boundaries.
The four states
- SLA — Green — Policy is active. Plenty of time remaining. — Carry on; no urgency
- At risk — Yellow — First threshold crossed. The window for a clean response is narrowing. — Look at it now if it’s yours; reassign if you can’t
- Urgent — Red — Last threshold before breach. Minutes-to-hours from violation, depending on policy. — Drop everything that isn’t more urgent
- Breach — Red, overdue — The SLA target was missed. Timer flipped to count up. — Respond as fast as possible to minimize impact
The visual indicators are consistent everywhere SLAs are surfaced: conversation list rows, the conversation header, the inbox sidebar counters, Analytics dashboards.
Escalation is one-way
A conversation’s risk state only climbs:
SLA → At risk → Urgent → Breach
It never walks back down within a single conversation. A timer pause (going outside office hours), an agent response, or even completing the metric early does not return the badge to a calmer state.
This is intentional. The risk state captures the worst point the conversation reached during the SLA’s life — useful for retrospectives (“how many of our resolved conversations breached at some point?”). If a conversation hit At risk and you replied in time, the badge stays At risk for the rest of the conversation’s active life.
The only reset is to close the conversation. On reopen (next section), some metrics restart their timer.
On reopen
When a conversation moves from done back to active (because the customer replied), each tracked metric’s timer restarts — with one important exception:
First Reply Time does NOT restart if an agent has already replied. That promise was kept. The First Reply badge stays as
Meteven after reopen.
The other metrics (All Messages, Resolution Time) restart fresh. Resolution Time in particular gets a new countdown — you have the full target duration again to resolve the reopened conversation.
On close
When a conversation moves to done, the live countdown freezes. The badge flips from a counting timer to a static label:
- Met — the metric was satisfied within target
- Breached — the metric exceeded target before close
The final status is calculated once and recorded in the conversation’s audit trail. Even if the conversation later reopens and the badge changes, the historical record of the previous resolution survives in the Analytics data — you can see “this conversation breached on its second iteration” in reports.
A breached SLA can’t be un-breached
Once the timer hits zero, the SLA is breached. There’s no “set the badge back to Urgent” override. The breach goes into the historical record permanently.
What you can do: respond as fast as possible to minimize the negative-time count and the customer-impact window. The breach is logged regardless, but a 30-minute breach is meaningfully better than a 5-hour breach.
Audit trail
Every SLA assignment a conversation has ever had — including ones it had earlier in its life if the policy assignment changed — is preserved:
- The policy ID
- The metric type
- The priority band when the assignment started
- The start time, the due time, the actual response time
Useful for analytics, debugging “why did this breach?”, and any audit-style review.