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A customer service VP runs the SLA attainment report and sees 78 percent. The team has been hitting their numbers all month according to the supervisors. The report is right; the supervisors are right; the SLA configuration is wrong. Most SLA reporting drift comes from misconfigured pause conditions or business hours that do not match real coverage.

Enhanced vs Standard

Enhanced SLAs (the current default) track multiple KPIs per case, support pause conditions, and work with business hours. Standard SLAs are legacy. Use enhanced. If you inherit an environment with Standard SLAs, plan a migration; the two systems do not coexist cleanly and standard is on the deprecation track.

Enhanced SLA features:
- Multiple KPIs per case (first response, resolution, escalation)
- Pause and resume on configurable conditions
- Business hour and holiday calendar integration
- Per-priority SLA items
- Warning and breach actions

KPI Instances

Each case gets one or more KPI instances per applicable SLA item. Timers on the case track time to first response, resolution, etc. The instance carries the start time, the warning time, the failure time, and the current status. Reports query the instance, not the case.

<fetch>
  <entity name="slakpiinstance">
    <attribute name="kpiid" />
    <attribute name="status" />
    <attribute name="failuretime" />
    <attribute name="warningtime" />
    <link-entity name="incident" from="incidentid" to="regarding">
      <attribute name="ticketnumber" />
      <attribute name="prioritycode" />
    </link-entity>
    <filter>
      <condition attribute="status" operator="eq" value="3" />
    </filter>
  </entity>
</fetch>

Status 3 is Noncompliant. This pulls the breach list with the case context.

Business Hours

Map your support coverage (24x5, 24x7, regional). Assign per SLA. Business hours plus holiday schedules make SLA times realistic. The most common misconfiguration is using the org default business hours for an SLA that applies to a 24x7 customer; the timer pauses overnight and the customer sees a missed expectation.

Business hour patterns:
- Tier 1 customers: 24x7 coverage, no pauses
- Tier 2 customers: 8am-8pm local, weekend pause
- Tier 3 customers: business hours weekdays

Bind the right business hour pattern to each SLA item. Validate by creating a test case after hours and watching the timer behavior.

Pause Conditions

Waiting on customer? Pause. Waiting on third party? Also pause if contractual. Without pause, SLA breaches misrepresent agent performance. The pause condition is a FetchXML filter on the case state; when the filter matches, the timer pauses.

Pause conditions:
- Status = Waiting for Customer
- Status = Waiting for Third Party (with explicit contract)
- Custom: agent has explicitly paused with reason

Do not pause on internal handoffs. If the case sits in a queue waiting for an internal team, that time counts toward the agent SLA. Hiding it is dishonest reporting.

Reporting

Dashboards on SLA attainment by team, priority, and case type. An SLA attainment below 90 percent is either a process problem or a staffing problem. Build the report with KPI instance status as the measure and case priority as a slicer.

Attainment formula:
total_compliant_instances / total_instances * 100

Cut by:
- Team
- Priority
- Case type
- Time period
- Customer tier

Watch the trend, not the snapshot. A drop from 95 to 88 over four weeks is more actionable than the absolute number.

SLA Actions

The warning and failure actions are underused. The warning action can email the queue manager 30 minutes before breach; the failure action can escalate to a supervisor and update the case priority. Configure these for high-value SLAs and you catch issues before they hit the report.

Warning at 75% of timer:
- Email queue manager
- Add tag for visibility

Failure on breach:
- Escalate priority
- Notify supervisor
- Log to supervisor dashboard

Customer Communication

When an SLA is at risk, the customer-facing communication is the difference between a frustrated customer and a calmed one. Build a template that the agent can send when the warning fires; transparency about the delay is more effective than silence.

What to do this week

Audit your SLAs for business hour alignment, pause conditions, and warning actions. Build the SLA breach query and run it weekly with the supervisor team. Validate one SLA end to end by creating a test case and walking through the timer behavior.

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