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Three mistakes account for most SLA setups that nobody trusts. All three are made at the start and felt for years.
1. Targets set from ambition
Somebody decides two hours sounds professional. Nobody checks what the team currently does. Within a month a third of tickets are breaching, the dashboard is red every day, and everyone stops looking at it.
Instead: report on your actual first reply time first. Set the target near what you already achieve most of the time. Tighten it deliberately once, later, and watch what happens.
2. Calendar hours on a team that works office hours
A four-hour target on calendar hours means a ticket arriving at five on Friday has breached by nine, with nobody in the building. Your figures then measure your opening hours rather than your service.
Instead: business hours for anything a normal team handles, with a schedule that reflects when you genuinely answer.
The choice is made per priority rather than once for the whole policy, so urgent can run on calendar hours while everything else follows the schedule. That is usually the honest arrangement: you do answer an outage at nine on a Sunday, and you do not answer a question about an invoice.
3. Measuring resolution instead of response
Resolution time reads well in a contract and behaves badly in practice, because most of a long resolution is waiting: for the customer, for a supplier, for a fix from another team.
Holding a team to something largely outside their control produces breaches nobody can act on, and the usual response is agents solving tickets prematurely to stop the clock.
Instead: first reply time, then next reply time. Those measure something your team controls.
Where a contract obliges you to promise a resolution target anyway, the metric you pick decides whether the objection above applies at all. Total resolution time counts time in Pending and stops for nothing but Solved, so it charges you for the customer's silence. Agent work time counts New and Open only, pausing on both Pending and On-hold, and is the closest thing to a resolution target that measures your team rather than everybody else's. Agree the wording in the contract against the metric you will report, not the other way round.
The pattern behind all three
Each measures something the team cannot influence, and each produces a number that gets ignored. An SLA nobody looks at is worse than none, because it looked like you were managing something.
Worth a second opinion before you commit. Show us the targets you are considering and your current figures. Changing them later is easy in Zendesk and awkward with customers who were told a number.
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