SLA calculator — what your target really promises
Pick your working hours and a target in business hours, and this shows you the calendar time a requester will actually experience. Everything is computed in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
What you are actually promising
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Business hours a week: —
Working hours a year: —
Why this matters more than the number you pick
Most desks publish "resolved within 24 hours" and mean 24 business hours. A requester reads it and means 24 hours. On a Wednesday those are nearly the same promise. On a Friday evening they are three days apart, and that gap is where almost every complaint about a service desk comes from.
Two things fix it, and neither is a bigger number. Say which kind of hours you mean, wherever the target is published. And make sure the clock pauses while you are waiting on the requester, or you will breach targets for tickets where you did nothing wrong.
Questions
Should our SLA be in business hours or calendar hours?
Business hours, almost always — you cannot resolve at 3am with nobody on shift. The important part is saying so wherever the target is published, because a requester who reads "24 hours" and waits three days will not be consoled by the distinction afterwards.
Do public holidays count?
Not if your calendar excludes them, which it should. In India that is the difference between a promise you keep and one you break twelve times a year, and regional holiday lists vary enough that it is worth configuring per location.
What about time spent waiting on the requester?
The clock should pause. If it does not, you will breach targets on tickets where you did nothing wrong, your team will learn the metric is unfair, and they will stop caring about it — which costs you more than the breach did.
What is a sensible first target?
One response target and one resolution target, in business hours, for everything. Split by priority only after you have three months of data showing where the split should be.
Or let the software do the arithmetic
Business hours, holidays and clocks that pause while you wait on the requester — with a panel on every ticket explaining exactly how its deadline was reached.