@Brittany-RG if your customers all have a very similar SLA, you can use workflows and put the amount of days/minutes as a delay. And then use a smart supression list to unenroll the ticket from the escalation.
Supression lists always run before the next step in a workflow.
If clients have different SLA’s, you can create a pipeline for each SLA type and follow above steps.
We are about to launch our Customer Portal for your customers to be able to track the status of their tickets. And phase 2 of this will be an SLA tool.