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.
If a conversation starts before a public holiday, the SLA timer skips the holiday entirely. The breach time is pushed forward by the equivalent of the holiday duration, and the timer resumes at the start of the next working day.
Learn how to add Holiday Office Hours to your workspace.
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If a conversation starts before a public holiday, the SLA timer skips the holiday entirely. The breach time is pushed forward by the equivalent of the holiday duration, and the timer resumes at the start of the next working day.
How SLA pauses affect breach calculations
SLA timers can be paused — for example, when a conversation is snoozed or a customer hasn't replied. When a pause ends, the timer resumes from where it left off. This is expected behaviour, but it can sometimes make the elapsed time look different from what you'd calculate manually.
Here's what to keep in mind:
Pauses only stop the SLA clock — they don't extend the breach deadline. When the timer resumes, it continues from the same point it paused.
The SLA breach time shown in reports is calculated from the original SLA start time, adjusted for pauses and office hours. This may differ from a manual calculation that adds up elapsed time across multiple periods.
Office hours and pauses interact: time spent outside office hours is not counted toward the SLA, whether or not the conversation is also paused. If a pause overlaps with non-office hours, only the in-hours portion of the active (non-paused) time counts.
Note: If your manual calculation of elapsed business hours doesn't match an SLA breach shown in Intercom, check whether any pauses overlapped with office hours transitions (e.g., a conversation snoozed across a weekend). The system counts only active, in-hours time — pauses during business hours are excluded from the SLA clock, which can shift the breach point in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
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.
Scenario 3
Let's consider the following setup:
Office hours: 9am–5pm, Monday to Friday
Tuesday is a public holiday with Holiday Office Hours configured (closed all day)
First Response Time (FRT) SLA: 4 hours
A customer starts a conversation at 3pm on Monday
Because the SLA timer only counts office hours, and Tuesday is a holiday (no office hours), the timer doesn't count any time on Tuesday. The 4-hour SLA window spans from 3pm Monday (1 remaining office hour) and then resumes at 9am Wednesday. The breach time would be 12pm Wednesday.
In short: the SLA timer effectively skips the holiday and picks back up at the start of the next working day.
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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