Understanding business hours email SLAs
A business hours email SLA measures how quickly agents send their first reply to an email ticket, counting only the hours your team is actually working. If your target is "first reply within 13 business hours" and a ticket arrives Friday afternoon, the clock pauses over the weekend and resumes Monday morning — agents are never penalized for time when nobody is scheduled to work.
This article covers how to enable business hours, how to configure the email first touch SLAs, how agent-initiated (reach-out) tickets are handled, and which SLA variant to use when you want true first touch times.
Before you start: business hours must be enabled on your account
Business hours metrics are only available once the Business Hours Schedule Feature is enabled for your account. You can check under Settings → Account Settings — search for "business hours". Once enabled, you can set which days and hours your team operates, or turn on Zendesk Business Hours Sync to pull your Zendesk schedules automatically every night.
If you don't see the Business Hours Schedule Feature in your settings, reach out to your Qvasa CSM to get it enabled for your account.
Configuring the email first touch SLAs
SLAs are configured under Settings → Service Level Agreements. Each SLA takes a threshold (in minutes for email SLAs) and an optional target adherence rate — the percentage of tickets you aim to answer within the threshold. For example, a 13 business hour target is a threshold of 780 minutes, with a target adherence rate of 80% if your goal is to hit it on 80% of tickets.
Four SLAs in the email group measure first touch time after first assignment:
Email First Touch Time After First Assignment — time from the agent's first assignment to their first public reply, counted around the clock.
Business Hours Email First Touch Time After First Assignment — the same measurement, but only business hours count toward the elapsed time.
Email First Touch Time After First Assignment Excluding 0s — the around-the-clock measurement, with zero-second first touch times always excluded.
Business Hours Email First Touch Time After First Assignment Excluding 0s — the business hours measurement, with zero-second first touch times always excluded.
Why the "Excluding 0s" variants exist — and when you should use them — comes down to how Qvasa treats tickets that your agents start.
How agent reach-out tickets are handled: zeroed first touch times
Some tickets are started by your own team — an agent creates a ticket on a customer's behalf and sends the first message, for example during proactive outreach. On these tickets there is no customer waiting for a first reply, so measuring a "first touch time" would be meaningless (or worse, wildly inflated when the customer replies days later and the agent responds again).
If the first public comment on a ticket was written by an agent, Qvasa records every first touch time on that ticket as zero seconds — the regular first touch time, the business hours first touch time, and both after-assignment variants. Reply time exchange metrics (average and median reply times across the conversation) still compute normally.
That zero is a deliberate marker, and the two SLA variants treat it in opposite ways:
The standard SLA includes 0s. A zero-second first touch is within any threshold, so every agent reach-out counts as an instant SLA success. If your team does a lot of proactive outreach, this inflates the SLA rate — the metric mixes real response performance with automatic wins.
The Excluding 0s SLA leaves those tickets out entirely. Zero-second first touches are removed from both the numerator and the denominator, so the rate reflects only tickets where a customer actually waited for a first reply.
To measure true first touch times, use the Excluding 0s variants. The standard variants answer "what share of all assignments — including our own outreach — were touched within threshold"; the Excluding 0s variants answer the question most teams actually mean: "when a customer wrote to us, how often did we get back to them in time?"
Adding the SLA widgets to a dashboard
Once an SLA is configured, its widgets appear in the widget picker. Edit a dashboard, click Add Widget, choose the Quick stat type (single number) or Basic chart type (trend over time), and search for "excluding zeros" — the widgets live under Ticket Comment Records Metrics.
Each SLA family ships the full widget set:
SLA rate quick stat — the percentage of first assignments answered within your threshold, with a ticket drill-in to audit the exact tickets behind the number.
SLA rate over time — the same rate charted across your date range.
By-agent donut charts — the rate, the within-SLA count, and the outside-SLA count broken down per agent, each with ticket drill-ins.
By-agent over time — per-agent SLA rates trended across time.
The widget's SLA threshold and target adherence rate default to your account-level SLA configuration, and can be overridden per widget — useful for comparing a stricter internal target side by side with your customer-facing commitment.
Troubleshooting
You don't see the Business Hours Schedule Feature in Account Settings. It isn't enabled for your account yet — reach out to your Qvasa CSM.
The business hours SLA widgets don't appear in the widget picker. Two things must both be true: the business hours feature is enabled, and the matching SLA has a threshold configured under Settings → Service Level Agreements. Configure the SLA (or contact your Qvasa CSM) and the widgets appear.
A widget shows an "Advanced Zendesk Ticket Comment metrics are not enabled" message. These SLAs are built on the ticket comment metric family — ask your Qvasa CSM to enable it for your account.
The standard and Excluding 0s rates differ a lot. That gap is your agent reach-out share — the standard rate is counting outbound tickets as instant successes. The Excluding 0s rate is the true first touch number.
A business hours first touch time looks shorter than the wall-clock time. That's the feature working: evenings, weekends, and other off-schedule hours don't count toward business hours durations.