--- title: "Customer Support SLA Template (Free, Copy-Paste) With Response Time Examples" description: "Free SLA template for email support teams: copy-paste sections, response time targets by priority, and how to track SLAs in Gmail." author: "Cody Duval" url: https://www.keeping.com/content/customer-support-sla-template/ datePublished: 2026-10-24 --- # Customer Support SLA Template (Free, Copy-Paste) With Response Time Examples > **The short answer:** A customer support SLA template states the channels and hours you cover, how you rank ticket priority, and the first-response and resolution time you promise for each priority. For email, a common start is a first reply within one business hour for urgent tickets and one business day for normal ones; adjust to what your team measurably hits. Measure in business hours. Sooner or later a customer asks, “What’s your response time?” Usually it’s a bigger account, and usually they want it in writing. A customer support SLA template gives you that answer on one page: the channels you cover, your support hours, how you rank ticket priority, and the first-response and resolution time you promise for each priority. That one page is all the customer service SLA most small teams need. For an email team, a reasonable starting point is a first reply within one business hour for urgent tickets and within one business day for normal ones. Then adjust both to what your team can measurably hit. Measure in business hours, not calendar hours. Otherwise a ticket that arrives at 4pm and gets a reply at 10am the next day counts as an 18-hour miss instead of a 2-hour reply. I run Keeping, a help desk that sits inside Gmail, so I see a lot of small teams set up their first SLA. The template below is the one I’d hand them. Copy it, change the bracketed parts, and replace my numbers with yours. ## What an SLA template for customer support includes A support SLA template covers eight things, and they’re the questions a customer will ask anyway: - Agreement overview: who the parties are, when it starts, how long it runs - Service scope and exclusions: which channels and requests are covered, and which aren’t - Support hours and channels: the days, hours and time zone the clock runs in - Performance metrics: what gets measured, such as first response time and resolution time - Response and resolution times by priority, with a definition of each priority - Customer responsibilities: what the customer has to provide for the clock to mean anything - Remedies: what happens on a miss, from a service credit to a review call - Termination and signatures: how either side ends it, and who signs An internal SLA, the kind support agrees with engineering or finance, usually drops the remedies and signatures. Nobody issues a service credit to the engineering team. ## Customer support SLA template (a service level agreement template to copy) Here’s the template. Fill in everything in brackets; the rest can stay as written. Treat the targets as illustrative starting values and replace them with numbers from your own last four weeks. --- **Customer Support Service Level Agreement** **1\. Parties and term.** This agreement is between \[Your company\] (“we”) and \[Customer\] (“you”). It starts on \[date\], runs for \[12 months\] and renews with your subscription unless either of us gives \[30 days’\] written notice. **2\. Scope.** We provide support by email at \[[support@yourcompany.com](mailto:support@yourcompany.com)\], in \[English\]. Other channels, including phone and social media, are not covered by this agreement unless listed here. Building requested features, custom development and training are outside its scope. **3\. Support hours.** Our support hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00 \[time zone\], excluding the public holidays listed at \[link\]. All response and resolution times below are measured in these business hours. **4\. Priority levels.** We set priority when a request arrives, using these definitions: - Urgent: our service is down for you, or you can’t take or make payments. - High: a key feature is broken for you, with no workaround. - Normal: how-to questions, account changes and billing questions. - Low: feedback, feature requests and general questions. **5\. Response and resolution targets.** | Priority | First response | Resolution | | --- | --- | --- | | Urgent | 1 business hour | 8 business hours | | High | 4 business hours | 2 business days | | Normal | 1 business day | 3 business days | | Low | 2 business days | 5 business days | A first response is the first reply from a person on our team. Automatic acknowledgements don’t count. The resolution clock pauses while we’re waiting for information from you and restarts when you reply. **6\. Your responsibilities.** Send requests to the support address above, from an address on your account, and include the details we need to act (account name, order number, steps to reproduce, screenshots). Tell us if a request is urgent. **7\. Escalation.** If a ticket is about to miss its target, our support lead takes it over. You can escalate any ticket by replying with “escalate” and we’ll respond within \[1 business hour\]. **8\. Reporting and review.** We’ll send a monthly report of the share of tickets that met each target. We review this agreement with you every quarter. **9\. Exclusions.** The targets don’t apply to problems caused by third-party services, by changes you make to your own systems, or by events outside our reasonable control. **10\. Remedies.** \[Optional. For example: if we meet fewer than 90% of first-response targets in a calendar month, we’ll credit 5% of that month’s fee. Have a lawyer review any remedies clause before you sign.\] Signed for \[Your company\]: \[name, title, date\] Signed for \[Customer\]: \[name, title, date\] --- ![Customer support SLA template with response times by priority: urgent tickets get a first response in 1 business hour and resolution in 8, high in 4 business hours and 2 business days, normal in 1 and 3 business days, low in 2 and 5 business days](https://www.keeping.com/_astro/sla-targets-table.gt7V7M5f_Z1xEi5H.webp) Two notes on the targets. They’re illustrative: what an email team of a few people can usually sustain, not your data. To set your own, take four weeks of first response times and, if you’ll promise 90%, use your 90th-percentile time for each priority (the section on writing an SLA explains why). And if a customer only cares about one number, promise the first response. You control when you reply. You don’t always control when a fix ships. Auto-replies are excluded on purpose. An [automated response email](https://www.keeping.com/content/automated-response-email/) that says “we got your message” is useful, but counting it as a response makes the SLA meaningless. ## Service level agreement examples for three kinds of support team The template above gives every customer the same terms. Three different kinds of team would bend it in three directions, and each of these is an example to adjust, not a standard. An ecommerce store usually needs one tier for everyone. Its first-reply target is one business day on email, tightened to four business hours in the weeks around Black Friday when “where’s my order?” questions pile up. Resolution targets are mostly about refunds and replacements, so they’re written in days. A B2B SaaS company often needs two tiers. Standard customers get the template as written. Premium customers, who pay for it, get urgent first responses in 30 minutes and a named contact for escalation. This is the version a large customer asks for during procurement. An internal help desk, IT or HR answering employees, drops the remedies and signatures and ties its targets to how much work a ticket blocks: “can’t log in” is urgent, “new monitor” is low. The point is to stop requests from vanishing into someone’s inbox. ### What is a good SLA response time? A good SLA response time is one your team already hits at the rate you’re promising. For context, across Keeping teams from June 22 to September 20, 2026, 33% of first responses took under one working hour and about three quarters took under 24 working hours. More of that data is in our [customer service response time benchmarks](https://www.keeping.com/content/customer-response-time/). It describes typical replies, not urgent ones, so it can’t tell you what your urgent target should be. ## Business hours vs calendar hours decide whether you hit your SLA Measure in business hours unless you staff support around the clock. With support hours of 9:00 to 17:00, a ticket that arrives at 16:00 and gets a reply at 10:00 the next morning took 2 business hours. In calendar hours it took 18. Same reply, but one version of your SLA calls it fast and the other calls it a miss. Time zones and holidays trip teams up. If your team works in two time zones, say whose hours the clock follows, or run a separate mailbox per region. And list your holidays, or a customer will reasonably assume the clock runs on them. ## How to write a service level agreement your team can keep The order matters more than the wording. Here’s how I’d do it: 1. Measure your current first response time for four weeks before you write a single target. Your help desk report or a spreadsheet of timestamps will do. 2. Set each target from the rate you plan to promise. If you’re promising 90%, read the 90th percentile of your measured times, not the median. Half your tickets already take longer than the median, so a target set there gets missed half the time. 3. Write the [ticket priority](https://www.keeping.com/content/ticket-priority/) definitions with the people who answer the inbox. They know which “urgent” emails aren’t. 4. Run it internally for a month before you show it to a customer. Fix your [ticket triage](https://www.keeping.com/content/triaging-tickets/) first if priority gets set late. 5. Review it every quarter, and loosen a target you keep missing rather than quietly ignoring it. The step people skip is the first one. Without data, the guess usually comes from a big company’s SLA with fifty agents behind it. ## How to track your SLA in Gmail You can track an SLA in Gmail with labels and a saved search, up to a point. Give each priority a label, then search each morning for threads older than the target, for example `label:urgent older_than:1d`. That breaks past a few dozen emails a day. A label can’t tell you whether anyone has replied, and nobody gets warned before the deadline. A help desk does the counting for you. In Keeping you create an SLA under Settings, then Automations, then Add SLA. Each SLA watches one mailbox and has one time condition, First response time or Resolution time, counted in business time or calendar time. Auto-replies don’t count as a first response, and resolution time pauses while a ticket is pending. ![Keeping’s SLA builder with a First response time condition measured in business time, plus a Customer name condition](https://www.keeping.com/_astro/keeping-sla-conditions.FhESMKPC_ZUowvk.webp) You can add conditions such as the customer’s email address or the subject line, so a key account’s domain gets a tighter clock than everyone else. Keeping doesn’t set an SLA from a ticket’s priority field, so per-priority targets are built from conditions like these. When a ticket misses its target, Keeping adds an SLA Violation tag that can’t be removed. You can also assign the ticket to someone else or send a desktop notification. An SLA applies to conversations that start after you create or update it, and a ticket triggers it only once. ![Keeping’s SLA actions: set the SLA Violation tag, notify a teammate and assign the ticket](https://www.keeping.com/_astro/keeping-sla-actions.DgpZmwVj_1qFpcV.webp) For the monthly report your SLA promises, the [SLA metrics](https://www.keeping.com/content/sla-metrics/) guide covers what to measure, and [response time tracking](https://www.keeping.com/content/email-response-time-tracking/) covers how to do it in Gmail. When a target starts slipping, [SLA compliance](https://www.keeping.com/content/sla-compliance/) covers how to measure the miss rate and catch breaches before they happen. SLAs are one part of an [email ticketing system](https://www.keeping.com/content/email-ticketing-system/), alongside assignment and statuses. As of October 2026, Hiver includes SLAs from its Pro plan at $55 per user a month billed annually, and Help Scout includes one basic SLA policy on its $25 Standard plan. In Keeping, SLAs come with the [Advanced plan](https://www.keeping.com/pricing/) at $24 per user a month billed annually. If you’d like this SLA to run itself, put it on your support mailbox. With [Keeping as your Gmail help desk](https://www.keeping.com/solutions/help-desk/), a missed first reply gets an SLA Violation tag and can go straight to someone who can answer it. ## Frequently asked questions about SLA templates ### What is an SLA contract? An SLA contract is a service level agreement written into, or attached to, a customer contract. It turns the targets into obligations: miss them and the contract says what happens, usually a service credit or the right to cancel. If yours will carry penalties, have a lawyer read it before anyone signs. ### What does 4 hour SLA mean? A 4 hour SLA means the provider commits to act on a ticket within four hours. The agreement has to say whether that means a first reply or a fix, and whether the hours are business or calendar hours. Four business hours from a Friday 3pm ticket is Monday 11am. ### What are three key features of a service level agreement (SLA)? Three features matter most. A defined scope says which channels, customers and hours the SLA covers. Measurable targets set first-response and resolution times for each priority. A measurement method says how the clock runs, what pauses it and how misses are reported. Without all three, nobody can tell whether the promise was kept. ### What are the three types of SLAs? The three usual types are customer-based, service-based and multilevel. A customer-based SLA is written for one customer. A service-based SLA gives every customer the same terms for one service. A multilevel SLA layers them, for example standard terms for everyone and faster targets for customers on a premium plan. ### What is SLA in customer service? In customer service, an SLA is the written promise a support team makes about speed: how quickly customers get a first reply and how quickly issues are resolved, by priority and within stated support hours. It can be external, shared with customers, or internal, a target the team holds itself to. ### What does 99.99% SLA mean? A 99.99% SLA is an uptime promise: the service will be unavailable for no more than about 52 minutes a year. It describes how reliably a product runs, not how fast support answers. A support SLA promises reply and resolution times instead, so a team can have one without the other.