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 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:
- Add Tag(s) overdue
- Send an Email, Notify Help Scout User(s), Current Assignee
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: Add Tag near-due
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: 
Tags and Folder Views
The tag will give a visual indication in the Inbox which conversations are near or over the SLA timeframe, and the view will organize them in one easy to find place.
For more on views see Create and Manage Folder Views.
Report Views
Report views will help you pinpoint exactly how many conversations have exceeded the SLA and find how many came close.
Read more about creating and managing Views here: Use Views to Filter Reporting Data
Set your report view to the tag overdue, and specify any other criteria you need, to catch the conversations that have exceeded your SLA.
Use a combination of criteria to find out which conversations got close, but didn't go over. Set the tag is to near-due, and tag is not to overdue to find those conversations.
