SLA policies for tickets

With SLA Policies you decide how fast tickets must be answered, how often the customer must be updated and when the ticket must be solved. Simply CRM tracks it on every ticket and marks the ticket when a deadline is at risk or missed.

If you don't see SLA Policies under Support, ask your administrator to activate the module.

Who can change policies

Administrators create and edit SLA policies. Other users can open and read the policies, but not change them.

Create a policy

1. Go to Support → SLA Policies and click Add.
2. Policy: give it a name, set Active, and set Order. Tickets get the first active policy (lowest order) whose conditions they meet.
3. Applies when: add conditions, for example Priority equals Urgent, or Organization equals ACME. You can use any ticket field, so the policy works with your own priorities and values.
4. Targets (minutes):
   • First response within – time to the first reply.
   • Update customer every – optional; how often the customer must hear from you after that.
   • Resolve within – optional; time to solve the ticket.
   • "At risk" before deadline – how many minutes before a deadline the ticket is marked At risk.
5. Calendar: choose if the clock runs 24/7 or only in business hours. For business hours, set work days, start and end time, and holidays (one per line: DD-MM every year, or DD-MM-YYYY once). Times use the time zone of the user responsible for the policy.
6. Clock:
   • Pause the clock when – e.g. Status equals Wait For Response. The paused time does not count.
   • Fulfilled when – e.g. Status equals Closed. The SLA then stops.

Make one policy per level, e.g. one for Urgent (1 hour) and one for Normal (8 hours). A policy for a specific customer can have a lower order number, so it wins over the general ones.

What you see on the ticket

The SLA block on the ticket shows:

• SLA policy – picked automatically. You can also pick one by hand; it is then kept.
• SLA status – Running, At risk, Violated, Paused or Fulfilled.
• SLA violated – stays checked once a deadline was missed.
• First response due / at, Next deadline, Resolution due.
• Time remaining and Time elapsed in minutes (business time). Use them in list filters, e.g. tickets with less than 30 minutes left.

The values are updated every 5 minutes. Only tickets created after the policy are tracked. A closed ticket keeps its final SLA result.

What counts as a reply

A reply is an email linked to the ticket that was sent from Simply CRM or from one of your users' addresses, or a public comment written by a user. Emails and portal comments from the customer are customer messages.

Act when a deadline is at risk or missed

Create a workflow on Tickets with the condition SLA status has changed to e.g. At risk or Violated. The workflow can send an email or SMS, assign the ticket to someone else or update fields.

Good to know: each time SLA status or SLA violated changes, Simply CRM saves the ticket once. This also runs your Ticket workflows set to run every time the record is saved, and the ticket's last modified by becomes the system administrator. Check those workflows, e.g. that they don't email the customer on every save.