Gorgias SLA & Business Hours Explained

What a Gorgias SLA actually measures

A Service Level Agreement policy in Gorgias attaches time targets to tickets that match certain conditions. Per the Gorgias SLA Policies documentation, each policy governs two clocks:

• First Response Time — the gap between a customer's message and your agent's first reply. This is the metric shoppers feel most acutely, and the one most teams promise against.
• Resolution Time — the duration from the first inbound message to the ticket being closed. Gorgias requires the resolution target to be longer than the first-response target, which makes sense: you can't resolve faster than you can reply.

You can set either target anywhere from 1 minute to 14 days, entered in seconds, minutes, hours, or days. That's a wide range on purpose — a live chat about a stuck checkout deserves a two-minute promise, while a complex return dispute can reasonably carry a two-day resolution target. If you're still deciding whether Gorgias is the right home for this in the first place, our what is Gorgias primer covers the wider platform.

Setting an SLA, step by step

Everything lives in one place. Following Gorgias' set SLA policies guide, you configure policies here:

1. Open the Helpdesk dropdown in the top-left corner and select Workflows, then under Tools choose SLAs.
2. Click Create SLA and give the policy a descriptive name (e.g. "Chat — first reply 5 min").
3. Select the channel(s) the policy applies to from the dropdown.
4. Toggle on First Response time and Resolution time and enter each goal.
5. Optionally open Conditions to narrow scope — up to five tags and five ticket fields — so a policy only fires on, say, tickets tagged vip or subscription.
6. Make sure Enable SLA is toggled on, then click Save Changes.

SLAs are available on all Helpdesk plans, and access is limited to account owners, admins, and leads — so a front-line agent won't accidentally rewrite your promises.

Per-channel SLAs: why one clock doesn't fit all

The reason Gorgias makes you pick a channel per policy is that customer expectations are wildly different across them. A shopper in Chat expects an answer in seconds; the same shopper emailing about a warranty is happy to wait hours. So you build separate policies:

• Email — the classic first-response and resolution targets, usually the most forgiving.
• Chat — much tighter first-response windows, because a live visitor is watching for the typing indicator. Note that Gorgias Chat is its own product surface; if you haven't set it up, our Gorgias Chat explained walkthrough covers it.
• Social media — comments and DMs, where public visibility raises the stakes on a slow reply.
• Voice — the outlier. Voice SLAs cannot be combined with other channels and use percentage-based targets rather than a per-ticket clock — for example, "80% of calls are picked up within 2 minutes." Voice is also a separate Gorgias add-on, so this only applies if you've enabled it.

The practical takeaway: don't try to force one universal SLA. Model each channel's promise honestly, and let Gorgias run several policies side by side.

Business hours: pausing the clock when you're closed

This is the setting that trips up more teams than any other. Inside each policy there's a toggle — "Pause SLA timer outside of business hours" — and it quietly changes everything about how your achievement rate reads.

With it on, an SLA timer on an open ticket automatically pauses outside your defined business hours and resumes when the next working period begins. A ticket that lands at 6pm on Friday doesn't burn its whole first-response budget over the weekend — the clock simply doesn't start until Monday morning. With it off, the clock runs 24×7, which is what you want for a channel you genuinely staff around the clock.

Getting this wrong is the single most common reason a Gorgias SLA "isn't calculating correctly." If your achievement rate looks mysteriously terrible, the first thing to check is whether business hours are defined and whether the pause toggle matches how you actually staff that channel.

How breaches surface — and the honest gap

Here's where it's worth being clear-eyed. Gorgias surfaces SLA performance through the SLA Report, documented in the Gorgias SLA report reference. It gives you two headline cards — an Achievement Rate (the percentage of tickets that met the policy) and Breached Tickets (the number that missed at least one goal) — and you can click through to a drill-down that lists every breaching ticket and which policy it violated. You can filter by date, policy, channel, team, or agent to isolate where the pain is.

That's a genuinely useful reporting tool. But notice its shape: it's historical analytics, not a real-time alarm. The SLA Report tells you, after the fact, which tickets breached and by how much. It is not a live view that pings an agent "this ticket breaches in 5 minutes — go answer it now." Gorgias' native SLA feature is excellent at measuring and scoring the promise; the proactive, in-the-moment intervention — and the actual reply that stops the clock — is left to your team.

That matters because an SLA clock does three things it fundamentally can't:

1. It can't write the answer. It counts down while an agent reads the ticket and types.
2. It can't fix mis-triage. If a WISMO ticket lands in the wrong channel or without the right tag, the wrong (or no) policy applies.
3. It can't fetch context. When the question is "where's order #4471?", the clock just ticks while someone opens Shopify and looks. For steering tickets to the right policy in the first place, most teams lean on Gorgias rules and Gorgias macros — but those are deterministic, not reasoning.

Where an AI layer picks up

This is the seam an AI agent layer fills — not by replacing Gorgias' SLA engine, but by handling the part the clock can't. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists precisely to do the reasoning-heavy work a timer can't.

Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use through a live native connector — it is not a helpdesk replacement, and it doesn't touch your SLA policies, which stay your source of truth for what's promised and what's overdue. Once connected, Macha reads and writes the same tickets your SLAs already time. It can draft or post a grounded first reply so the first-response clock is beaten with a real answer; triage by intent so the right policy applies before the timer starts; and look up order or subscription status through a custom tool that turns your REST APIs into something the agent can call — so a WISMO ticket gets answered with the actual tracking number instead of a holding message. Our Macha–Gorgias integration overview covers how the connection is wired.

One honest contrast worth naming on the commercial side: Gorgias' native AI automation is billed per resolution, which ties your bill directly to volume you may not control. Macha's pricing works differently — credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution, so the cost maps to work done rather than outcomes that vary ticket to ticket. If you're comparing the two side by side, our Gorgias pricing explained and Gorgias AI Agent explained posts go deeper.

The clean division of labour: keep Gorgias' SLAs as the enforcement and scoreboard for what's promised and what's overdue, and layer an agent on top for the part the clock can't do — actually answering fast enough to keep the promise.

FAQ

Where do I set up SLAs in Gorgias? Open the Helpdesk dropdown in the top-left corner, choose Workflows, then under Tools select SLAs. Click Create SLA, name it, pick the channel, set your First Response and Resolution targets, and toggle Enable SLA on. SLA settings are limited to account owners, admins, and leads.

What SLA targets can Gorgias enforce? Two per policy: a First Response Time and a Resolution Time (which must be longer than the first-response target). Each can be set from 1 minute to 14 days, in seconds, minutes, hours, or days, and scoped with up to five tags and five ticket fields.

Do Gorgias SLAs work per channel? Yes. You build separate policies for Email, Chat, and Social media, each with its own targets. Voice is the exception — it can't be combined with other channels and uses percentage-based targets like "80% of calls picked up within 2 minutes."

How do SLA breaches show up in Gorgias? Through the SLA Report, which shows an Achievement Rate card and a Breached Tickets card, with a drill-down to every ticket that missed a goal and which policy it violated. Note this is historical reporting — it's not a real-time alert that a specific ticket is about to breach.

Can I add AI to Gorgias SLAs without replacing Gorgias? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and runs on top of your existing helpdesk and its SLA policies — it doesn't replace them. It helps meet the targets by drafting or sending grounded first replies and triaging by intent, while Gorgias stays the system of record for what's promised and what's overdue.

Ready to help your agents beat the clock instead of just watch it? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.