What is the SLA System?

Service Level Agreements in Atender provide visual, real-time tracking of the response and resolution time commitments your team makes to customers. SLAs create urgency where it’s needed and ensure no conversation falls through the cracks.

An SLA is two things working together: a policy that defines how fast you’ll respond (configured in Settings), and a timer that runs against that policy on every conversation it applies to (visible in the inbox).

Four risk states

Every conversation with an active SLA policy moves through four risk states, with escalating visual urgency:

• SLA — Grey — Policy is active, plenty of time remaining
• At risk — Yellow — First threshold crossed — needs attention soon
• Urgent — Red — Last threshold before breach — immediate action
• Breach — Red, overdue — SLA violated — timer flips to count up

These badges appear in the conversation list, on the conversation detail header, and in Analytics dashboards. An agent scanning their inbox sees risk state at a glance.

Escalation is one-way. Status only climbs — SLA → At risk → Urgent → Breach. It never walks back down while the timer runs, even if the timer pauses. An agent reply settles a First Reply or All Messages SLA as Met or Breached, and closing the conversation settles any SLA.

Three metric types

A policy tracks one of these metrics:

• First Reply Time — from the customer’s first message to the agent’s first reply
• All Messages — to any customer message, ongoing through the conversation
• Resolution Time — total time from creation to resolution

A typical setup tracks First Reply (because first impressions matter) and Resolution (because customers want their issue closed).

Office hours

By default, SLA timers only count during your team’s opening hours. A conversation that arrives at 5pm on Friday doesn’t start breaching at 5:01pm — the timer pauses until Monday morning. Calculations are timezone-aware and respect holiday country codes and date overrides.

Which hours count depends on the conversation:

• The conversation has a team — the SLA follows the opening hours set for that team and channel. A team with no hours of its own uses the workspace’s default opening hours.
• The conversation has no team yet — the SLA uses the workspace’s default opening hours. A new conversation often arrives before routing gives it a team, so its deadline is still counted in business hours, not around the clock.

You can flip a policy to ignore office hours for 24/7 SLAs (critical tiers, monitored channels, after-hours teams). See Run an SLA 24/7.

Channel and team scoping

A policy applies to conversations through an assignment. Each assignment can specify a team, a channel, or both. The most specific match per metric type wins:

• Team + channel — 3 — Highest specificity — beats everything else
• Team only — 2 — Used when no team+channel match exists
• Channel only — 1 — Fallback when only the channel matches

This lets you set a default “Email = 4 hours” policy and override it per team without duplicating the policy.

The channel list also has a Form choice. It matches conversations from a form made in the Form Builder, also when they arrive as email, and it is used instead of Email for them. A team assignment still wins over it. See Set up channel-specific SLAs.

When the team or channel changes

When an agent or a team lead moves the conversation to another team, an automation assigns it, the AI hands it over, or the conversation switches channel, the SLA is chosen again for the new team and channel. The deadline is counted again in the new team’s opening hours. The clock keeps the time the customer wrote in; it does not start again.

Two SLAs stay as they are:

• An SLA that an automation set.
• A First Reply SLA that is already answered — its Met or Breached result is final.

Automation hooks

SLAs are programmable signals, not just visual. Two Automation triggers fire as the scheduler reclassifies risk:

• An SLA is about to be breached — fires when status escalates to At risk or Urgent
• An SLA is breached — fires when status reaches Breach

Wire these to escalate to a manager, ping Slack, reassign to a senior agent, or anything else that needs to happen when an SLA tips. See the SLA escalation automation recipe.

Where to start

• Build your first policy: Create an SLA policy
• Understand the states: Risk states reference
• Pick the right metrics: Metric types reference
• Tier up: Tie an SLA to a customer tier
• Stop breaches mattering only after the fact: SLA escalation automation recipe