Your guide to the Gorgias SLA policy: Setup, tracking & automation

Setting up a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a big step for any ecommerce brand that genuinely cares about its customer experience. An SLA is your handshake deal with customers, a promise that you’ll get back to them and solve their problems within a certain timeframe. It's all about setting clear expectations and then doing everything you can to meet them.

But let’s be honest, creating a Gorgias SLA policy is the easy part. The real grind is hitting those targets day in and day out, especially when a flash sale goes viral or you're swamped during the holidays. Trying to track SLA breaches after they happen is a bit like looking in the rearview mirror to see what you just hit. The damage to the customer experience is already done.

This guide will walk you through setting up your Gorgias SLA policy, but more importantly, we'll get into the weeds of why a manual approach often falls short. Then, we’ll talk about how you can use AI to get ahead of the game, prevent breaches before they happen, and keep your customers happy.

What is a Gorgias SLA policy?

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is basically an internal promise you make about the level of service you'll provide. For customer support teams, this almost always boils down to speed.

A Gorgias SLA policy focuses on two key things:

• First Response Time (FRT): This is how long a customer has to wait for your team's first reply. It’s your first impression, and a long wait can start the conversation off on the wrong foot.

• Resolution Time (RT): This measures the total time from when a customer creates a ticket until you mark it as solved. It’s a good indicator of your team's overall efficiency.

Inside Gorgias, you can set up different SLA policies for different channels. You might aim for a super-quick two-minute first response on live chat but give yourself up to six hours for email. A handy feature is that you can pause the clock outside of business hours, so your team isn't on the hook for tickets that come in at 3 AM.

Ultimately, a Gorgias SLA policy helps you manage customer expectations and gives your team a clear, measurable goal to aim for.

How to set up and track your Gorgias SLA policy

Getting your first SLA policy running in Gorgias is pretty straightforward. This part is simple, but as you'll see, actually managing the policy is where things get messy.

Creating your first Gorgias SLA policy

First, you'll need to go to Settings → Productivity → SLAs. You’ll see two options. You can either use a pre-built template for channels like Email or Chat (a nice shortcut) or click Create SLA to start from scratch.

From there, you’ll name your policy, pick the channels it applies to, and set your goals for First Response Time and Resolution Time. You can set these in minutes, hours, or days. Once you hit save, the policy is active and will apply to all new tickets on those channels.

Monitoring Gorgias SLA policy performance with the SLA report

After your policies are live, you can check on your team's performance by heading to Statistics → Support Performance → SLAs. This dashboard gives you a bird's-eye view of how you're doing.

You’ll see two main numbers:

• Achievement Rate: The percentage of tickets that met all your SLA goals.

• Breached Rate: The percentage of tickets that missed at least one of your SLA targets.

You can filter this report by date, channel, or specific policy to get a better look at the details. It's helpful for seeing if a particular channel is struggling or tracking how your performance changes over time.

But here’s the catch: this report is a reactive tool. It's great for spotting long-term trends, but it only tells you about failures after a customer has already been left waiting.

A look at the Gorgias analytics dashboard, where teams can track their performance against their Gorgias SLA policy goals.

The hidden challenges of managing a Gorgias SLA policy manually

Having an SLA policy is a great start, but if you're only using the native tools in Gorgias, it can feel like you're constantly playing catch-up. The day-to-day reality of customer support is chaotic, and manual management often cracks under pressure.

Looking in the rearview mirror

The biggest issue with the Gorgias SLA report is that it’s essentially a post-mortem. It just confirms that a breach already happened, meaning a customer already had a poor experience. This forces team leads into a cycle of damage control, reviewing past mistakes instead of preventing new ones. Good management isn't just knowing you missed a target; it's about seeing why you're about to miss targets and fixing it before it's too late.

The threat of a sales rush

Imagine your marketing team’s latest campaign is a massive hit. Suddenly, your support inbox is exploding. During these peaks, even the best agents get overwhelmed trying to figure out which ticket to tackle next. Manual prioritization goes out the window, and your Gorgias SLA policy becomes the first casualty. What you're left with is a mountain of frustrated customers and a team heading straight for burnout. Your SLA promise is only as strong as your ability to keep it when things get crazy.

The burden of admin work

When an SLA is breached, a support manager’s work is just getting started. They have to spend hours digging through tickets to figure out what went wrong. Was it an agent who needed more training? A bottleneck in the returns process? One person having a rough day? This detective work is a huge time drain that pulls managers away from high-impact work like coaching their team or improving workflows. You can see what happened, but figuring out why is a slow, manual chore.

Using AI to hit your Gorgias SLA policy goals

What if you could stop just measuring your SLA performance and start guaranteeing it? This is where an AI agent can step in to work alongside your team right inside Gorgias. It’s not about replacing your agents, but about giving them an incredibly efficient assistant.

Guarantee First Response Time with instant, smart replies

An AI agent can respond to every new ticket the second it arrives, 24/7. This alone ensures your First Response Time target is met every single time. And this isn't just a generic "we received your email" auto-reply. A tool like eesel AI learns from your past Gorgias tickets to give a genuinely helpful, context-aware first response that starts solving the customer's problem right away.

Boost Resolution Time by automating common questions

So many support tickets are repetitive. You know the ones: "Where's my order?" "What's your return policy?" "Do you ship to my country?" An AI agent can answer these in seconds and close the ticket, often without a human ever touching it. This clears out the noise and lets your agents focus on the complex issues where their expertise is really needed. The eesel AI "AI Agent" connects directly to your help center, past tickets, and even your Shopify store to pull the right answer instantly.

An example of the eesel AI agent automating a common question to improve resolution time and meet Gorgias SLA policy targets.

Prevent bottlenecks with AI-powered triage

For tickets that do need a human, speed still matters. You can't let an urgent ticket from a high-value customer just sit in the queue. An AI agent can read an incoming ticket, understand what it's about, and automatically tag it, set the right priority, and route it to the correct team. eesel AI offers powerful "AI Triage" that works right within your Gorgias setup, making sure complex tickets get to the right expert without delay.

Test your AI's impact with confidence

The idea of letting an AI talk to customers can be a little scary, I get it. With eesel AI's simulation mode, you can test your AI setup on thousands of your own historical tickets. This gives you a data-backed forecast of how it will impact your resolution rate and Gorgias SLA policy achievement, all in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have performed and tweak it before it ever interacts with a live customer. It's a risk-free way to roll out automation.

The simulation mode in eesel AI, which allows teams to test the impact of automation on their Gorgias SLA policy before going live.

Gorgias pricing overview

To give you the full picture, here’s a quick look at the standard pricing for the Gorgias platform itself. Just remember, these plans cover the helpdesk and its built-in features.

Plan	Price (Billed Monthly)	Key Features
Starter	$60 / month	50 conversations/mo, basic help desk features for small teams.
Basic	$360 / month	300 conversations/mo, phone & voice channels, 15 integrations.
Pro	$900 / month	2,000 conversations/mo, revenue statistics, satisfaction surveys.
Advanced	$2,500 / month	5,000 conversations/mo, dedicated success manager, advanced reporting.
Enterprise	Custom	Custom conversation volume, enterprise-grade security and support.

Pricing can change, so it’s always a good idea to check the official Gorgias pricing page for the latest info.

Stop chasing your Gorgias SLA policy and start automating it

A Gorgias SLA policy is a must-have for setting clear expectations for your support team. It’s your definition of what great service looks like. But relying on manual tracking alone is a reactive strategy that keeps you focused on past problems instead of future opportunities.

The best way to consistently meet and exceed customer expectations is to pair the measurement tools in Gorgias with proactive AI automation. When you do that, you shift from reacting to breaches to preventing them altogether. Your team gets to spend less time on repetitive questions and more time on conversations that matter, and your customers get the fast, helpful answers they've come to expect.

Don't just report on missed targets, stop them from happening in the first place. Ready to see how AI can transform your Gorgias workflow?

Try eesel AI for free and see it in action in minutes.