SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a "promise with customers" and a standard for measuring support team performance. If the settings are too lenient, customer satisfaction will decrease, and if the settings are too strict, the team will become exhausted.Service Hub's SLA can be set by priority, channel, business hours, and time zone, and from March 2025 onwards, it will be possible to individually set uptime for each rule.did. This chapter systematically explains the definition of the three metrics FRT, TTR, and CSAT, SLA rule settings, time zone support, escalation automation, and achievement rate reporting.
An SLA is a rule that specifies a time commitment for "by when this ticket will be responded to and resolved." This may be specified in a contract with a customer, or it may be set as an internal goal for the team. The SLA feature in HubSpot Service Hub (Professional and above)Set SLA rules according to ticket priority, channel, and pipeline, automatically calculate deadlines, and automatically alertFilter example: Affiliate company plan = Enterprise / Status = Open → Ascending creation date
Before designing an SLA, first clarify what you want to measure. There are three main metrics to measure support quality.
If you calculate FRT and TTR by including weekends, holidays, and late-night hours, tickets that arrive outside of business hours will always be evaluated as ``slow response.'' Service Hub SLAThe design of KB, Customer Agent, and ticket categories are all calculated backwards from ``actually frequently received inquiries''. By performing this review before installation, the accuracy and speed of configuration will be greatly increased.Automatic ticket generation
HubSpot's SLA settings are configured from "Settings → Service → SLA". Available for Professional and above.Different rules can be set for each priority and pipeline. Enterprise also allows you to use ``conditional SLA'', which allows you to dynamically switch rules depending on ticket properties.
| priority | FRT target (during business hours) | Resolution time target (during business hours) | alert timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🔴 Urgent | Within 30 minutes | Within 4 hours | 15 minutes before the deadline + instant notification after the deadline is exceeded |
| 🟠 High | Within 2 hours | Within 8 hours (during business hours) | 30 minutes before deadline + notification after deadline |
| 🟡 Medium | Within 4 hours | Within 24 hours (during business hours) | 1 hour before deadline + notification after deadline |
| 🟢 Low | within 8 hours | Within 72 hours (during business hours) | Notification after exceeding (once a day) |
It is important to set the SLA to "count only during business hours." Setting location:Related tickets can be linked together. The ``parent-child ticket'' configuration, which consolidates multiple tickets caused by the same bug into a parent ticket and manages them all at once, is especially effective for technical support teams.. You can create multiple business hours schedules (Enterprise) and apply different schedules for each SLA rule (from March 2025).
If the SLA count continues to advance while waiting for a response from the customer, it will incorrectly be recorded as "slow agent."Setting location: SLA settings → "Pause timer at a specific stage" → Select "Waiting for customer response" stage. If SLA is operated without this setting, the achievement rate will appear lower than the actual situation, leading to a decrease in agent motivation.
With the March 2025 update,Working hours and time zones can be set individually for each SLA ruleIt became like that. Previously, only one business hours schedule could be applied across the organization, but this change makes it practical for Japanese and European teams to manage SLAs separately in different time zones.
| team region | Business hours schedule | time zone | Eligible tickets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Japan (APJ) | Mon-Fri 09:00–18:00 | Asia/Tokyo（UTC+9） | Pipeline = Japan Support / Team = Japan |
| Europe (EMEA) | Mon-Fri 09:00–17:30 | Europe/London（UTC+0/+1） | Pipeline = EMEA Support / Team = EMEA |
| North America | Mon-Fri 08:00–18:00 | America/New_York（UTC-5/-4） | Pipeline = Americas Support / Team = US |
| Urgent (globally common) | Mon-Sun 24 hours | UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) | The quality and quantity of learning sources are directly linked to Customer Agent resolution rates. |
① Create a schedule for each region by going to Settings → General → Business Hours → “Add Business Hours Schedule”. ② Settings → Service → SLA → “Add SLA rule” → Select the target pipeline/priority. ③ Select the schedule created in ① in "Operating hours" and specify the corresponding time zone in "Time zone". ④ Enter the target value for FRT/solution time and save.Enterprise allows parallel operation of multiple schedules. Only 1 schedule in Professional(However, from March 2025 onwards, it will be possible to make individual settings for each priority on Pro.)
There is no point in setting an SLA if nothing happens when the SLA deadline approaches or exceeds it.It is essential to design automatic escalation of “SLA Danger → Alert Notification → Responsible Person Change → Manager Notification” in the workflow.is. HubSpot allows you to use SLA triggers as conditions in ticket-based workflows.
| Workflow name | Amount of information that can be displayed at once | Main actions |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent FRT 15 minute alert | Priority = Urgent / SLA FRT 15 minutes remaining | Slack notification to agent |
| High FRT 30 minute alert | Priority = High / SLA FRT 30 minutes remaining | Email notification to agent |
| SLA FRT exceedance notification | SLA FRT Status = Exceeded | Notify Manager / Change ticket assignee to manager |
| Solved SLA 2 hour alert | Resolution SLA 2 hours remaining / Status ≠ Closed | Notify agent + team lead / Automatically record in internal memo |
| Resolution SLA Exceeded Notification | Resolution SLA Status = Exceeded | Notify Manager + CS Director / Record flag in weekly report |
Merely setting and implementing SLAs is not enough.A mechanism to regularly measure and report achievement rates and take improvement actions.is necessary. Service Hub has a Help Desk analysis tab and a custom report builder that allows you to analyze SLA achievement rates from multiple angles.
Daily (Agent): Review Workspace's SLA risk view and address your zero expiration goal.Weekly (Manager): Check the FRT achievement rate and number of SLA exceedances by priority on the weekly summary dashboard, identify the categories and persons in charge with the highest number of exceedances, and provide support.Monthly (CS Leader): Evaluate the effectiveness of measures based on monthly trends and set improvement themes for the next month.
FRT measures whether the person in charge has accepted the request, TTR measures the speed of resolution, and CSAT measures the quality of response. By designing and tracking the three as a set, SLA operations can achieve a balance between speed and quality.
Without this setting, delays on the customer side will be recorded as violations of the agent's SLA. Setting location: SLA settings → Pause timer at specific stage → Select Wait for customer response.
Even if your Japan, Europe, and US teams use the same HubSpot, you can set the business hours and time zones for each region individually in your SLA rules. Be sure to set up a global team.
Slack notification to agent 15 minutes before Urgent's SLA deadline → If unresponsiveness is met, the agent is transferred to the manager after the deadline is exceeded -- these two steps of escalation significantly reduce the SLA overrun rate.
Categories with the longest resolution times = areas where the knowledge base is lacking the most. Use the results of TTR analysis as they are as ``the topic on which you should write a KB article first''.
By automatically distributing a dashboard that collects FRT/TTR achievement rate, CSAT, and SLA exceedances on one screen every Monday, the cost of sharing the status of the team becomes zero.