SLA control
A promise with a timer on it, not a hope
Every ticket carries two clocks: time to first response and time to resolution. Both respect your working week and your time zone, both change colour as they tighten, and both escalate before they break rather than after.
- Separate first-response and resolution targets per priority
- Working hours and time zone per workspace, weekends excluded
- Amber warning, then escalation, then a recorded breach
- Pending replies pause the clock while you wait on the customer
First response and resolution clocks
49:12
until first response is due
Business hours pause the clock overnight and at weekends, so a Friday 6pm ticket is not breached by Monday morning.
Inside the workspace
What your team actually sees
SLA state is visible in the queue itself: minutes remaining on the calm ones, amber on the tight ones, and breached tickets pulled to the top.
- HD-418212m left
Invoice total looks wrong
Priya - Northwindbilling - HD-4181breached
Cannot sign in to the portal
Marcus - Arclightaccess - HD-41781h 40m
Order SO-88213 never arrived
Dana - Kestreldelivery - HD-41743h 05m
How do I add a teammate?
Sam - Fielderhow-to - HD-41706h 12m
Refund request for March
Ana - Looprefund
Invoice total looks wrong
HD-4182 - Northwind Ltd - priority: high - owner: Rae S.
Priya Raman - customer
09:12
Our March invoice shows 14 seats but we only have 11 active agents. Can you check before we pay?
Internal note - not visible to the customer
Billing exported the seat log: 3 seats deactivated on 12 March, pro-rata credit due.
AI draft - grounded in docs + 42 past resolutions
Hi Priya, you are right - three seats were deactivated on 12 March. I have raised a pro-rata credit of £186 against invoice INV-2291 and it will appear on your next statement...
Customer
- Priya Raman
- priya@northwind.co
- Client
- Northwind Ltd - Tier 1
- Open tickets
- 2
- CSAT
- 4.8 / 5
SLA
- First response
- 12m left
- Resolution
- 5h 40m
- Policy
- Tier 1 - business hours
Audit trail
- 09:12 captured from support@
- 09:12 rule "billing" set priority high
- 09:12 round-robin to Rae S.
- 09:14 AI draft generated
Capabilities
Built for this job, not bolted on
Two clocks per ticket
Answering fast and finishing properly are different promises, so Hookdesk measures them separately.
Business hours
Define the working week once. A Friday evening ticket is not three days late by Monday stand-up.
Time zone aware
Clocks follow the workspace time zone, so distributed teams and customers see the same deadline.
Escalation before breach
Warn the owner, then notify the lead, at thresholds you set - the breach is the last resort, not the alert.
Priority policies
Urgent, high, normal and low each get their own targets, and routing rules set the priority automatically.
Provable performance
Every clock start, pause and stop is stored, so your SLA reporting is evidence rather than an estimate.
How it runs
From arrival to answer
- 1
Start
The clock starts the moment the ticket is created, on the policy for its priority.
- 2
Pause
Moving to Pending, or falling outside business hours, pauses the countdown.
- 3
Warn
At your warning threshold the ticket turns amber and the owner is nudged.
- 4
Report
Attainment, near misses and breaches roll into Reports by client and agent.
End to end
Everything this part of the platform covers
Each block below is a working part of the product, not a roadmap item.
Targets and policies
Separate clocks for first response and resolution, set per priority and per client tier.
- First-response targets in minutes or hours per priority
- Resolution targets that can differ by tier and ticket type
- Policies attached automatically by routing rules
- Clear at-risk thresholds before anything actually breaches
Business hours
Clocks only run when your team is working, so an overnight email does not burn the target.
- Workspace timezone with per-day working windows
- Holidays and non-working days excluded from elapsed time
- Pending status pauses the clock while you wait on the customer
- Reopened tickets restart the response clock, not the whole history
Visibility
The clock is on the ticket, on the queue row and on the dashboard - never hidden in a report.
- Colour-coded time remaining on every inbox row
- At-risk and breached counts on the home dashboard
- SLA panel on the ticket with policy, target and remaining time
- Breach reasons recorded so the retro is factual
Reporting on time
Attainment is measured the same way the clocks run, so the numbers survive scrutiny.
- First response and resolution attainment by period
- Period-over-period deltas rather than raw totals alone
- Breakdowns by agent, client, tag and priority
- Exportable figures for customer-facing service reviews
Who it is for
What each person gets out of it
Team leads
See risk while it can still be fixed, not in next month's report.
Agents
Know which ticket genuinely comes first without guessing.
Account managers
Walk into a service review with defensible attainment numbers.
Customers
Promises that reflect real working hours, and are actually met.
Features inside this area
Go a level deeper
Business hours
Working weeks, holidays and paused clocks.
CSAT and feedback
Pair speed with a quality signal.
Notifications
Alerts before a target is missed.
Audit trail
Every pause, breach and policy change logged.
Custom fields
Drive policy selection from structured data.
Tags and catalogue
Slice attainment by request type.
Detail
The small print that matters
Holidays
Add non-working days to the calendar and every clock in the workspace respects them.
Per-client targets
Enterprise clients can carry tighter targets than the workspace default.
Reopened tickets
A reopen restarts the response clock so the second question is answered as fast as the first.
Breach handling
Breached tickets are flagged permanently on the record; the flag cannot be quietly cleared.