Your complete guide to the Intercom SLA report (and its limitations)

Let's be real: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren't just numbers on a dashboard. They're the promises you make to your customers. When you tell a customer they'll get a response within an hour, you're setting an expectation. Nailing those promises consistently is what separates a decent customer experience from a truly great one.

If your team uses Intercom, the Intercom SLA report is your main tool for seeing how you're stacking up against those promises. It's built to give you a clear look at how well you're keeping up with your own standards.

But honestly? While it's a decent start, it has some major blind spots that can be a real headache. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about the Intercom SLA report, from getting it set up to making sense of the metrics. Most importantly, we'll get into its biggest flaws and show you how to get the kind of detailed insights your team actually needs.

What is an Intercom SLA report?

In a nutshell, the Intercom SLA report is a scorecard that tracks how well your team is keeping up with the time-based goals you've set. Its whole purpose is to help you see where you're winning, find any slowdowns, and make sure customers are getting help in a timely way.

It's worth knowing that SLAs aren't a feature you just turn on. You have to set them up using Intercom's Workflows, which kick off an SLA timer based on certain rules you define.

Intercom focuses on four main SLA metrics:

• First Response Time (FRT): How long it takes an agent to send that very first reply to a new conversation.

• Next Response Time (NRT): The time between replies for the rest of the conversation.

• Time to Close (TTC): The total time from the moment a conversation starts until it's marked as closed.

• Time to Resolve (TTR): This one is for tickets only and measures the total time until a ticket is fully resolved.

A quick guide to your Intercom SLA report setup

Before you can dig into the data, you’ve got to get things configured. Here’s a quick rundown of how it works.

Creating SLA rules in Workflows

You can't just flip an "SLA" switch in Intercom; you have to build them directly into your automated processes using the Workflow builder. This is where you create rules based on triggers and conditions.

For instance, you could build a rule like this: WHEN "A new ticket comes in" and IF "The customer's plan is Enterprise," THEN "Apply the VIP SLA." You can get pretty creative with rules based on customer or conversation data, which is great for sorting things out. But as you'll see in a bit, reporting on these different groups is where things start to fall apart.

A view of the Intercom Workflow builder, where users create automated rules for applying SLAs based on specific triggers and conditions.

Accessing the SLA report template

Once your SLA rules are running, you can start tracking performance. To find the report, just navigate to Reports > SLAs from your Intercom dashboard.

The standard template gives you a few handy charts right away, like "Conversation SLA miss rate," "Targets hit over time," and "Hourly distribution of missed targets." They give you a pretty good bird's-eye view of how your team is doing.

The Intercom SLA report dashboard, showing key performance charts like SLA miss rate and targets hit over time.

Understanding the key metrics in your Intercom SLA report

Getting the report running is one thing; actually knowing what the data is telling you is another. Let’s break down the most important metrics you'll see.

Core performance metrics explained

The default SLA report template highlights a few key numbers. Here’s a simple translation of what they mean.

The hidden problem with 'SLA hit rate'

Here's where things get a little tricky. The "SLA Hit Rate" looks simple enough, but as people in the Intercom community forums have pointed out, it can hide some ugly truths.

Let’s walk through an example. Imagine a single conversation has four different SLA targets: one for the first response and three for later replies. Your team drops the ball and misses the first one, the crucial First Response Time, but nails the next three replies.

In Intercom’s report, the "SLA Hit Rate" for that conversation shows up as 75%. And technically, the math is right. But for the customer who was left waiting, that's a 100% failure. Their first impression was poor, and that's what they'll remember. The report completely papers over that critical miss, making performance look better than it actually felt for the customer.

Critical limitations of the native Intercom SLA report

If your team is growing or you have specific contracts with clients, you'll start to feel the limitations of the standard report pretty quickly. These are the issues that the native tool just can't solve.

Limitation 1: You can't filter by company or custom attributes

This is, hands down, the biggest frustration for most teams. As you'll find discussed in Intercom's own community forums, you cannot filter the SLA performance report by company or any custom attributes.

The impact of this is huge. It means you can't generate a report to see if you're meeting your contractual obligations for your most important enterprise clients. You can't segment performance by a custom field like "Product Area" or "Issue Type" to see if a particular team is underwater.

The "official" workaround? It's as painful as it sounds: manually exporting raw conversation data and trying to stitch it all together in a spreadsheet. This doesn't just take forever; it's also a recipe for mistakes and simply won't work as you scale.

Limitation 2: Disconnected automation and reporting

You can create different SLAs for different types of customers in your Workflows, but you can't easily compare how those different groups are performing in a single report.

The automation is solid for applying the rules, but the reporting is weak when it comes to analyzing the results. This pushes everyone into a generic, one-size-fits-all report, even if your support is highly segmented. You're left knowing that SLAs were missed, but you have no easy way to see which customer segments were most affected without hours of manual digging.

Supercharge your Intercom SLA report with AI automation

So what are your options? You could switch helpdesks, but that's a massive project. A better approach is to add an intelligent layer on top of Intercom to fill these gaps. That’s exactly what tools like eesel AI are built for.

Gain total control with a customizable workflow engine

The eesel AI Agent connects directly with your existing Intercom helpdesk and gives you much tighter control over your automation. Unlike Intercom's native workflows, eesel AI can use any piece of data, company name, customer plan, what the ticket is about, or any custom field, to make decisions.

This solves the reporting problem right at the source. You can build rules to automatically tag, prioritize, or even resolve tickets for specific clients, making sure their SLAs are always a top priority. For example, you could create a rule that tags all conversations from "BigCorp" and then easily filter your reports by that tag to see their specific SLA performance.

Test complex SLA rules with risk-free simulation

Changing your SLA rules in Intercom can feel like running a live experiment on your customers. You launch a new workflow and just cross your fingers.

eesel AI gives you a much safer way to make changes with its simulation mode. Before a new rule goes live, you can test it against thousands of your past tickets. This shows you exactly how your new SLA policies would have performed, giving you solid forecasts on things like resolution rates and SLA success. You can tweak everything with real data before a customer ever sees the change.

Intercom pricing for SLA reports

To get access to SLAs and the workflows you need to build them, you'll need to be on one of Intercom's paid plans. Here’s a quick look at how their pricing is structured.

Note: Pricing is based on annual billing. Fin resolutions have a 50-resolution monthly minimum when used with an external helpdesk. Source.

Go beyond basic Intercom SLA report metrics

The Intercom SLA report gives you a decent starting point for tracking your support team's performance. It can tell you if you're hitting your main targets and give you a general idea of where you're falling behind.

But for any team that needs to report on client-specific agreements or manage different tiers of support, its inability to filter by company or custom attributes leaves huge gaps in your reporting and creates a ton of manual spreadsheet work.

That’s where adding a tool like eesel AI comes in. It works with your existing Intercom setup, giving you the flexible automation and detailed control needed to not just measure your SLAs, but to actually hit them every single time.

Ready to fix your Intercom reporting gaps and automate with confidence? See how eesel AI enhances your existing helpdesk in minutes.