Suppose your customer support team can’t easily tell you how fast they respond to customers, how many tickets are backlogged, or which issues show up the most. In that case, you’re missing critical operational insight. HubSpot Service Hub enables you to track SLAs, report on ticket data, and assess your service team’s performance—but only if your portal is set up correctly.
In this guide, we’ll break down how SLAs work inside HubSpot, how to configure them, what metrics matter most, and how to use reporting to evaluate both customers and support reps.
SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are internal commitments your team makes to maintain a consistent level of service. For example:
Respond to all tickets within one hour
Resolve all issues within eight hours
Provide faster turnaround for high-priority cases
Many teams also share SLAs externally to strengthen their sales and marketing message - but internally, they exist to build discipline and clarity.
Without SLAs, your customer service team is operating without standards. With them, you can hold reps accountable and create predictable, measurable outcomes for customers.
Everything begins with your ticket pipeline. Most teams receive tickets through one or more of the following:
Support inbox
Website form
Chatbot
Customer portal
Dedicated team email
HubSpot’s Help Desk consolidates these channels so reps can respond from one place while maintaining routing, tagging, ownership, and communication history.
If your team is managing support without the Help Desk, moving into it is one of the highest-impact improvements you can make.
SLAs should only count during the hours your team is actually working. In HubSpot, go to:
Settings → Inboxes → SLA Settings → Operating Hours
Set days and times (for example, Monday–Friday, 8:30–5:00). This ensures response time calculations are realistic and accurate.
This is one of the most important customer service metrics. HubSpot allows you to:
Set one rule for all tickets
Create different rules based on priority or ticket type
Control when tickets are “due soon” or “overdue”
Most service teams apply time-to-first-reply to all tickets to ensure nobody waits unnecessarily for acknowledgment.
Time-to-close often varies by ticket type or priority. For example:
Urgent: Due in 4 hours, overdue at 8
Medium: Due soon at 6 hours, overdue at 12
Low: Due soon at 12 hours, overdue at 24 hours
These ranges depend entirely on your business model, but the structure remains the same.
When SLAs are active, HubSpot automatically provides six default reports, including:
Tickets closed over time (SLA met vs. not met)
Average time to first reply
Average time to close
Ticket distribution by owner
Current open ticket volume
Ticket volumes compared over time
This is the foundation of a support analytics dashboard.
After implementing SLAs, most organizations want to track:
Cross-reference activities like calls, emails, and notes with resolution data to see:
Which reps respond fastest
Who closes tickets quickly
Who maintains the highest customer satisfaction
Combine NPS and CSAT surveys to understand how customers feel about your team’s performance and how their satisfaction changes over time.
SLAs are the foundation of high-performing service teams. They bring structure to your support process, they help you evaluate your team fairly, and they give leadership the data needed to improve customer experience.
If you want a deeper review of your HubSpot portal, you can apply for a recorded real-time audit where we analyze your setup and provide recommendations.
At The Gist Inbound, we help businesses set up HubSpot the right way, from automation like this to complete CRM builds and inbound marketing strategies. If you want to scale your growth without adding more to your plate, let’s talk.