Tie an SLA to a customer tier

Premium customers expect faster responses. Standard customers don’t pay for them. The standard pattern is: route VIPs to a dedicated team, attach a tighter SLA to that team. The conversation’s tier determines the team; the team determines the SLA.

Note on direct tier→policy linkage. Each Customer Tier can be linked to an SLA policy in tier configuration. The schema supports this end-to-end, but the auto-apply pathway (a tier-linked policy attaching at conversation creation time) is not fully wired up yet. The team-based pattern below is the working approach for now.

The pattern

Three pieces working together:

1. A premium SLA policy with tighter targets, scoped to a team.
2. A premium team that handles tier-1 customers.
3. A routing automation that assigns VIP-contact conversations to the premium team automatically.

Once wired, every VIP conversation is on the faster SLA without any manual classification by agents.

Before you start

• A Premium team configured in Settings → Teams
• Customers tagged with their tier via Customer Tiers or a customer_level field
• Admin permissions on SLA Policies and Automation Rules

Steps

Step 1 — Create the premium SLA policy

1. Open Settings → SLA Policies.
2. Click New policy. Name it Premium. Description: Tightened SLA targets for VIP-tier customers.

3. Configure metrics with shorter targets than Standard Support:

   
   First Reply — 0 — 15m — 1h — 4h
   Resolution — 0 — 4h — 8h — 1d

4. Under Team Assignment, select Premium. Leave channels empty (covers all channels).

5. Save.

Step 2 — Confirm the routing exists

If you don’t already have an automation that assigns VIP conversations to the Premium team, build one. A minimal version:

• 1 — Trigger — Conversation created
• 2 — Condition — contact.customer_level equals VIP
• 3 — Branch — Always
• 4 — Action — Assign conversation → Team: Premium

See the VIP routing recipe for the full version.

Step 3 — Test end-to-end

1. Send a test inbound message from a contact whose customer_level is VIP.
2. The conversation should auto-route to the Premium team within seconds (the routing automation).
3. The SLA badge should reflect the Premium policy’s targets, not the standard ones.
4. Open a non-VIP test conversation. It should land on a non-premium team and use Standard Support’s targets.

Verify the resolution

A VIP-team-assigned conversation will use the most-specific SLA match it qualifies for:

• Premium policy (Team = Premium, Channel = empty) → score 2
• Standard Support policy (Team = empty, Channel = Email/Chat/etc) → score 1

The Premium policy wins. See Set up channel-specific SLAs for the assignment matrix.

If you want even tighter targets on specific premium channels, add a third policy: Premium Chat with Team=Premium, Channel=Web Chat — that scores 3 and beats Premium for chat conversations.

Variants

• Multi-tier setup. Add a Standard Plus team and policy between Premium and General; route mid-tier customers there. Tiers can have any number of bands.
• Time-of-day differentiation. Combine with Ignore office hours — Premium runs 24/7 while Standard respects office hours.
• Channel-specific premium. Premium customers get fast email but instant chat — separate policies per channel under the Premium team scope.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: A VIP conversation uses the standard SLA. Fix: Check the routing — was it actually assigned to the Premium team? Manual Executions on the routing automation tells you. If the routing fired but team assignment failed, the team name in the rule probably doesn’t match the configured team.
• Symptom: The Premium SLA applies but the targets feel wrong. Fix: Open the Premium policy and verify its priority targets — easy to set them by mistake using the Standard policy’s numbers.

See also

• Set up channel-specific SLAs
• VIP routing automation recipe
• Customer Tiers