topic Re: How to pause SLA in Tickets & Conversations

How to pause SLA

SomyaC — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:37:11 GMT

Hi all,

I have questions regarding SLA:

1. How to pause SLA for escalated tickets.

2. If tickets are reopening, how to change the SLA if Hubspot is counting the SLA of first response from the date the original ticket was created.

3. How to configure SLAs only for Business hours

Re: How to pause SLA

kennedyp — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 19:35:27 GMT

Hi @SomyaC! Welcome to the Community-- happy to have you here 😊

HubSpot has a great Knowledge Base article that covers managing SLAs in the inbox.

Hey @Bayanitani89 I know you just spoke with Support regarding SLA best practices, maybe you have some advice to offer here?

Re: How to pause SLA

BennyRoss — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:45:06 GMT

Pausing SLA for escalated tickets:
HubSpot doesn't have a direct "pause" for SLAs, but you can adjust the ticket status or create a workflow to temporarily stop the SLA countdown.
Changing SLA for reopened tickets:
To reset the SLA on reopened tickets, use workflows to either reset or apply a new SLA based on your preferences.
Configuring SLAs for business hours:
You can set your business hours in Account Settings > Objects > Tickets > SLA, and HubSpot will only count SLA time during those hours.

Hope this helps!

Re: How to pause SLA

Bayanitani89 — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:10:05 GMT

Hello @kennedyp thank you for tagging me here.

Pausing SLAs in the automatic sense that serves customer success is only possible in Enterprise subscription. I personally have not tried using workflows for SLAs yet.

The main pain point is, even if SLAs are active in selected working hours, they are not synced with Google Calendar or with any out of office time or meetings time for the agents. This can make an agent assigned a high priority live chat ticket while s/he is in a meeting plus leave the reply as overdue. Until these improvements are deployed, I will base the department metrics on something else.

Re: How to pause SLA

HZaremba — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:31:16 GMT

Hello, probably you can give some details on how pausing SLAs in the automatic sense that serves customer success is possible in Enterprise subscription? I was not able to defined a way for this, in any way I see SLA starts with tickets start and ends with ticket closed.

Re: How to pause SLA

JoeFromPinch — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 02:57:33 GMT

I see there is now an active beta underway for pausing. You may wish to look into it.

Re: How to pause SLA

karstenkoehler — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 04:17:37 GMT

Hi @SomyaC and everyone,

Good news – HubSpot has released a product update on this, under Settings > Product updates > All > SLA Pausing:

SLA Pausing

What is it?

This feature allows SLA timers to be paused based on ticket pipeline status. Service managers can designate specific pipeline stages to automatically pause all SLA timers when a ticket enters that stage. In Help Desk, reps will clearly see when a ticket is paused. SLA reports will reflect these pauses, ensuring consistency with what reps see in the Help Desk.

Why does it matter?

SLAs are key to measuring ticket lifecycle and agent performance. However, during stages like “on hold” or “waiting on customer,” agents often can’t take action - yet SLA timers continue counting down. To avoid unfairly penalizing agents and distorting performance data, we now offer a way to systematically pause SLA timers during these periods. This ensures SLA metrics more accurately reflect urgency and gives agents meaningful ownership without being held accountable for delays beyond their control.

How does it work?

Setting a pause condition

In Help Desk settings, admins can configure SLA pauses by selecting specific pipelines and pipeline statuses. Pauses can apply to all tickets or be conditionally triggered based on one or more ticket properties. When a ticket moves out of the designated status, the SLA timer automatically resumes.

Paused tickets in the Help Desk

Service reps can see when an SLA is paused by hovering over the SLA indicator on a ticket in Help Desk. They can also view, sort, and filter paused tickets directly in the Help Desk list view.

Paused tickets on the Help Desk Summary tab

On the Help Desk Summary tab, admins can quickly see the number of paused tickets for each SLA status - across time to close, time to first response, and time to next response goal

Who gets it?

Service Enterprise

Best regards!