SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and office hours work together in Intercom to ensure timely customer support while respecting the team's working schedule. SLAs intelligently adapt to the configured office hours and holidays, ensuring customers receive prompt service during business hours and preventing SLA breaches when the team is offline.
Impact of office hours on SLAs
SLA timers will be configured to fall within your office hours, which may result in additional time being added. SLAs timers are always running.
If a customer message is received outside office hours, additional time will be added to the timer so the actual SLA clock starts at the beginning of the next working day.
Additional time will be added to the timer when there is not enough time left in a business day to meet an SLA target. This is to ensure that any remaining time will resume during the next business day's office hours.
Default office hours settings
By default, 1 calendar day is considered as 24 hours.
However, if office hours are set to specific times (e.g. 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday), then calendar day will be divided by the number of office hours in a day (e.g. an 8-hour business day would divide one 24-hour day into three 8-hour days).
SLAs always take into account the team's true availability and working hours.
Holiday Office Hours
Holiday Office Hours allow you to define specific dates (including recurring annual holidays) that override your default office hours. This eliminates the need to manually adjust your schedule for public holidays.
When Holiday Office Hours are configured:
SLA timers automatically account for holiday closures or reduced hours.
Reply-time expectations are adjusted automatically for those days.
You avoid SLA miscalculations that can occur when manually editing office hours.
Learn how to add Holiday Office Hours to your workspace.
This feature requires the Expert plan.
Examples
Scenario 1
Let's consider the following setup:
Office hours: 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday
First Response Time (FRT) SLA: 1 day (24 office hours)
If a customer messages the teammate at 4:55pm on a Friday evening, the teammate will see "5 days" remaining on the inbox:
This is because:
The 1-day FRT is considered as 24 office hours.
The SLA timer includes Saturday and Sunday as calendar days.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday each have 8 office hours.
The 24 office hours will be completed by the end of Wednesday.
So, even though the teammate set the FRT to 1 day, it translates to 5 calendar days due to the office hours configuration and this is what the teammate sees in the Inbox.
Scenario 2
Office hours: 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday
First Response Time (FRT) SLA: 15 minutes
If a new message comes in at 4:50pm on a Friday, the expected response time would be 9:05am the next working day (Monday).
The teammate will see "3 days" on the inbox including Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, indicating when they have to respond.
Aligning SLAs with office hours enables realistic response targets and accurate reporting, ensuring efficient customer support while respecting the team's work schedule.
When office hours are changed to include a previously excluded day, existing SLA targets do not automatically update. They continue toward the previously calculated due time unless the SLA is reapplied or overridden. New tickets will calculate SLA targets using the updated office hours immediately.
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