How Business Hours Work in SLA Management

On records that include SLA policies, business hours are applied according to a hierarchy. Salesforce uses the business hours specified at the highest level.

So a milestone’s business hours override the SLA policies' business hours, which override the case or work order’s business hours. If no business hours are set on the milestone, then the SLA policy's business hours are used. And if business hours aren’t specified on the milestone or the SLA policy, the case or work order business hours are used.

You can also set business hours on entitlements. If you create a record from an entitlement, it inherits the entitlement’s business hours. However, if the entitlement is part of an SLA policy, we recommend leaving the entitlement’s business hours field blank. Related records automatically use the SLA policy's business hours.

When you set or update business hours, follow these best practices.

• If you want to use the same SLA policy for records that have different business hours, set business hours at the SLA policy level. For example, suppose that you set the business hours on an SLA policy to weekdays from 9 to 5. If a customer requests evening and weekend updates to their case, you can create an “Update Customer” milestone with its own 24/7 business hours.

• If you want to use different business hours for different severity levels, set business hours at the milestone level. For example, if the severity level of a case increases, you need to contact the customer more frequently. You can create a “Last Touch” milestone that changes business hours according to severity level while the other milestones in the SLA policy remain unchanged.

• To change the business hours specified on an active SLA policy, follow these steps.

  1. Open the SLA policy for which you want to change the business hours.

  2. On the Update SLA policy page, edit business hours.

  3. Click Save.

• The new business hours are now updated in the original SLA policy and in the milestone timer.