Not a template to fill in blind - six decisions that determine whether your targets survive contact with a real week. Answer them and this page assembles a policy you can copy straight into your help desk.
Most small desks need three. A fourth only earns its place if something genuinely warrants waking someone up. Every extra level is another judgement an agent has to make under pressure, and levels nobody can tell apart get used at random.
This is the decision that most often makes a policy fail. If the clock runs overnight and at weekends, every Friday evening ticket breaches before anyone could have touched it, and within a month the breach report is ignored.
If you support customers in more than one country, decide whose calendar applies before somebody argues about it during an incident. Writing "our office calendar" is a valid answer - an unwritten one is not.
Most teams pause it. If you do not, every slow-replying customer becomes your breach, and the number stops measuring anything you control. The counter-argument is that pausing can hide tickets that quietly stall - so if you pause, review paused tickets weekly.
Set targets you already meet most weeks, then tighten. A target you miss routinely trains the team to ignore the alert. These are measured in working hours under the schedule you set above.
| Priority | First response | Resolution |
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An alert addressed to everyone is addressed to nobody. Name a person or a group, and say what they do - not just that they are told. If the answer is "we will see it in the queue", you do not have an owner.
Answer the decisions to build your policy.
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SLA policies with operating hours, priorities and breach alerts are part of the free plan - 5 agents and 500 tickets a month, no credit card and no expiry.
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