SLA (Service Level Agreement)
A committed target — often on response or resolution time — that support promises to meet for a set share of tickets.
A customer or internal team needs an explicit, measurable service promise with scope and ownership.
The promise names eligible work, the clock, operating hours, pauses, severity, response, resolution, and breach action.
Copying a universal target without checking the demand, staffing, consequence, or customer need behind it.
An SLA is a promise with a threshold and a percentage: for example, "first response within 4 business hours on 95% of priority tickets." It exists to protect customers from being forgotten and to give the team a defensible definition of "on time."
SLAs are usually tiered by priority and channel, and measured as the percentage of tickets that met the target.
What it hides: SLAs measure the clock, not the outcome. A team can hit its response SLA on every ticket while resolving none of them well, and aggressive SLA targets can push agents to send hollow acknowledgements just to stop the timer. A good SLA protects the customer; a badly chosen one just protects the metric.