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Routing & SLA Policies

Routing and SLA policies work together to keep escalated work moving. Routing decides who should handle a conversation or ticket, while SLA policies define how quickly your team should respond and resolve it.

Groups

Groups are teams of agents that you create based on your internal team structure. They are used throughout the Help Desk for assignment, capacity management, and escalation targeting.

How routing works

When a conversation is escalated from the AI to a human agent, the system immediately runs through a series of rules to determine who should handle it.

  1. Mapping rules are evaluated first. Each mapping rule matches conversation attributes such as topic or intent to a target group.
  2. If no mapping rule matches, the system falls back to round-robin assignment across all eligible members in your workspace.
  3. Capacity rules are applied so the system does not overload a single agent.
  4. Per-platform capacity keys let you manage channel loads independently.

Priority rules

Priority rules let you configure how urgently a conversation is treated based on its attributes. You can set priority based on channel, contact group, contact context, topics, and labels.

Priority affects how conversations surface in the queue.

Agent presence and status

The system uses each agent’s presence status to determine whether they are eligible to receive new conversations.

  • Active — the agent is signed in and available
  • Away — the agent is signed in but temporarily unavailable
  • Offline — the agent is not available
  • Out of Office — the agent is on extended leave and is skipped during assignment

If an agent is currently on a phone call, the system will not route new phone or chat conversations to them until the call ends.

SLA target types

Each SLA policy contains one or more targets. A target defines a specific milestone to measure.

  • First Response Time — how quickly a human agent sends their first reply after a conversation is escalated
  • Resolution Time — how long it takes to fully close a conversation from the moment escalation begins
  • Custom — a team-specific milestone with custom start, completion, and cancel triggers

Configuring an SLA policy

When you create or edit an SLA policy, you configure the following for each target:

  • Start trigger — the event that starts the SLA clock
  • Completion trigger — the event that stops the clock and marks the target as met
  • Cancel trigger — an event that cancels the SLA entirely without marking it as breached
  • Business hours only — whether the SLA clock should count only during your configured operating hours
  • Breach notification — who is notified when an SLA is about to breach or has already breached

SLA tracker states

Once an SLA clock starts, each target is tracked individually.

  • Active — the clock is running and the target has not yet been reached or missed
  • Breached — the deadline passed before the completion trigger fired
  • Completed — the completion trigger fired before the deadline
  • Cancelled — the cancel trigger fired before completion or breach

Filtering by SLA status

In your inbox views, you can filter conversations by SLA state to surface the most urgent items. Sorting by SLA urgency brings conversations closest to breaching to the top of the list.

Next steps

Last updated on
Managing EscalationsCreating Groups for Routing