Setting a Shared Inbox SLA Your Team Can Actually Hit

Before setting a response-time SLA, pull two weeks of real data from your shared inbox: median first-response time, and the split between AI-resolved and human-handled conversations. Most teams are surprised by how much variance exists between channels.

Set your SLA at roughly 20% faster than your current median — ambitious enough to matter, achievable enough that your team isn’t constantly missing it. A target nobody hits stops being a target and starts being background noise.

Route by intent, not just by availability. Billing questions, technical issues and general inquiries have very different resolution times — a single blended SLA across all of them tends to undercount how hard the hard cases actually are.

Review the SLA monthly, not annually. As your AI Agent resolves a larger share of routine conversations, your human team’s median should keep dropping — which means your SLA should tighten with it.