Guides
A practical guide to SLAs
Business hours, pauses and the three targets that matter.
Every year we look at what separates the support teams customers love from the ones they tolerate. This year we had more data than ever: 41 million conversations, 1,200 teams, and a survey of 3,000 agents.
Speed still wins, but only up to a point
Customers forgive a lot if the first reply is fast and useful. Past ten minutes, satisfaction drops sharply. Past a day, it barely matters how good the answer is.
4m
median first response for the top quartile
+11 pts
CSAT when replies arrive within 10 minutes
38%
of volume answerable from existing articles
The help center is underused
More than a third of conversations could be answered by an article the team had already written. The problem is findability, not content.
“Once we linked articles in the first reply, repeat questions dropped by a fifth in a month.” Dana Whitfield, Ledgerly
The full report includes benchmarks by team size, industry and channel.