Service commitments
A service commitment answers a simple question: how quickly must we reply, and how quickly must we be done?
You write its rules in Settings, Service commitments. The product then computes, for every ticket, its deadlines, and shows you the ones that are near or past.
What a policy sets
Four targets, all optional. You only fill in the ones that make sense for you.
| The target | What it counts |
|---|---|
| First reply | From the moment the ticket opens until your first public reply to the customer |
| Next reply | The time between each new question from the customer and your reply |
| Resolution | From opening until the ticket is marked resolved |
| Closure | From resolution until final closure |
You can also declare business hours. A four-hour target set on a Friday at 5 pm then does not end on Saturday at 9 pm.
The rule that surprises, and matters most
Deadlines are computed from the opening of the ticket, never from the last change.
A ticket opened at 9 am at normal priority, moved to urgent at 3 pm, does not gain six hours. The urgent deadline is recomputed from 9 am, and may therefore already be past the moment you change the priority.
That is deliberate, and it is what makes a commitment mean something. If escalating reset the clock, changing the priority of an overdue ticket would be enough to make it on time, and your figures would no longer measure anything.
One exception: if you have already replied, the first-reply deadline no longer moves. It belongs to the past.
Which policy applies
Your policies form an ordered list, and the first one that matches wins. There is no score, no specificity calculation, no combination.
That is a choice, and here is why: you must be able to explain to a customer why a given ticket has a given deadline by reading your list from top to bottom. A points system would be more flexible and strictly impossible to justify.
Concretely, put the specific before the general:
- Urgent: reply within 30 minutes
- Billing team: reply within 2 hours
- All requests: reply within 8 hours
The last line is your safety net. Without it, a ticket that matches no rule has no deadline, and never shows up as overdue.
What you see on a ticket
Two counters, in the right-hand panel: first reply and resolution. Each is green, orange or red depending on whether it is far, near or past.
Changing the priority or the team of a ticket can therefore change its deadlines immediately, because those two fields are what policies match on.
What the AI agent tells the customer
When the AI agent opens a ticket, the product gives it the resolution deadline as a delay ("within 4 hours", "within 2 days"), never as a time of day: a delay has no time zone, and it is what the customer asks for. The agent repeats it to the customer in their language. If no policy applies to the ticket, it promises no delay.
Check it yourself in five minutes
- In Settings, Service commitments, keep or create an "All requests" policy with, for example, first reply 1 hour and resolution 4 hours.
- Open a ticket (by hand, or ask your website agent for one). In the ticket's right-hand panel, the two counters appear, green, with the deadline computed from the opening.
- Reply to the customer from the ticket: the first-reply counter freezes ("replied").
- Move the priority to urgent: if an "Urgent" policy exists higher in the list, the deadlines are recomputed immediately, from the opening (see the rule above).
- Let the deadline pass: the counter turns red, and the Overdue cases tile on Home counts this ticket. Resolve it: the counter says whether it was met or missed.
What does not exist yet
- No alert goes out when a deadline is near. The counters are read on screen; nothing writes to you.
- Snoozing does not pause the counters.
- Business hours are the same for a whole workspace; they cannot be declared per team.