Keep Track of Aging Conversations
Keeping track of aging conversations helps your team live up to your customer support goals, and helps your customers feel like they can trust you to get things done.
While we don’t have an official SLA (service-level agreement) feature built in to Help Scout, you can still track aging conversations using a combination of a few different features, including Workflows and Report Views.
If you're looking for more conventional SLA tracking, we recommend checking out Super SLA to get advanced SLA reporting & alerting that works seamlessly with Help Scout. Read more about the integration here: Connect Help Scout with Super SLA to Manage Service-level Agreements
In this article
Workflows
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Set up a time-based Workflow based on the Waiting Since condition, choosing the time window that would put your conversation overdue:
Waiting Since is longer than X hours (or days)
You can set up SLAs for all of your customers this way, or you can only set them for certain customers by adding additional conditions to target specific tag or custom field values, like a VIP.
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Set the Workflow to the following Actions to add a tag, send an email notification to the Help Scout user that's assigned, and copy the conversation to a folder:
- Add Tag(s) overdue
- Send an Email, Notify Help Scout User(s), Current Assignee
- Copy to Folder Overdue Conversations
To send a reminder email for team members getting close to SLAs, copy the workflow and move up the time based Workflows by a day or an hour as appropriate. Edit the Actions to change the tag and folder: - Add Tag near-due
- Copy to Folder Near Due Conversations
To send a reminder email for team members getting close to SLAs, copy the workflow and move up the time based Workflows by a day or an hour as appropriate. Edit the Actions to change the tag and folder: 
Tags and Folders
The Tag will give a visual indication in the Inbox which conversations are near or over the SLA timeframe, and the custom folders will organize them in one easy to find place. You can use the Copy Workflow functionality to set these for different time frames to stack.
More about custom folders here: Create Folders Using Workflows to Organize Conversations
Report Views
When it comes to reporting against your SLAs, report views will help you pinpoint exactly how many conversations are brushing up against your SLAs, or if your team ever reach them. Read more about creating and managing Views here: Use Views to Filter Reporting Data
Here's how you can track key metrics on those:
If you set your report view to filter by your Near Due Conversations folder, you'll get all of your reports through the lens of current conversations close to the SLA.
If you set your report view to filter by Overdue Conversations folder, you'll get all of your reports through the lens of current conversations that have reached the SLA.
If you set your report view to the tag overdue, you'll get your reports through the lens of every conversation that has ever reached your SLAs
