The dispatcher’s guide to SLAs that don’t burn people out
15-minute first replies are possible without heroics, if the clock pauses at 6 PM.
A first-reply SLA is a promise to the broker and a pressure on your team. Set it wrong and you get one of two failures: a target so loose it means nothing, or a target so tight that hitting it depends on people skipping lunch. A good SLA is aggressive on the metric and humane on the clock.
Measure first reply, not resolution
What a broker actually wants is to know they were heard. A 15-minute first-reply target is reasonable during business hours and does not require you to solve anything in 15 minutes. "Got it, checking on that truck now" stops the clock. Resolution takes as long as it takes.
Pause the clock after hours
This is the whole trick. If your SLA clock runs at 2 AM, your team either staffs the night or shows up to a wall of breaches every morning. Set business hours per inbox and pause the timer outside them. An email that arrives at 7 PM starts its clock at 8 AM, and nobody is punished for sleeping.
- First-reply target, not resolution target.
- Per-inbox business hours; the clock pauses outside them.
- Alert the lead on approaching breach, not the whole team on every tick.
- Review breaches weekly for patterns, not individually for blame.
Treat breaches as data
When a thread breaches, the useful question is why, not who. A cluster of breaches at 4:45 PM tells you coverage thins before the shift ends. A cluster on one inbox tells you it is understaffed. Used this way, the SLA stops being a stick and becomes the clearest signal you have about where the queue is straining.
Aggressive target, forgiving clock, weekly review. Teams that run SLAs this way hit 15-minute first replies for months without anyone burning out, because the number is built around the day people actually work.