The 5-Minute SLA Clock Nobody on Your Team Has to Configure
Chat tracks unassigned conversations against a fixed 5-minute SLA out of the box — a real, if currently rigid, dashboard number worth knowing about.
SLA management gets treated as an enterprise-tier feature in a lot of live-chat comparison content — something smaller tools lack entirely or gate behind a pricier plan. Chat ships a version of it by default, and it's worth being precise about exactly what that means, including the part that's a real limitation.
What actually gets tracked
Chat's dashboard tracks conversations that go unassigned past a threshold — currently a hardcoded five minutes (SLA_MINUTES = 5 in the dashboard data logic). A conversation that sits unassigned longer than that surfaces on the dashboard as its own stat: "Unassigned over SLA." It's not a vague sense that something's been waiting a while — it's a specific, countable number you can check at any point in your day.
The honest limitation
This is currently a fixed five-minute constant, not a per-workspace configurable SLA. If your business genuinely needs a ten-minute threshold, or thirty, or a different threshold for different teams, that's not something you can adjust today — it's a real gap, not a hidden setting you haven't found. Worth saying plainly rather than letting the feature sound more flexible than it is.
Why five minutes is a reasonable number to build against, even fixed
Five minutes lines up with what most live-chat research treats as a meaningful threshold — fast enough that a visitor hasn't given up and left, slow enough that a small support team isn't chasing an unrealistic target. If your workspace's actual needs are close to five minutes, the fixed threshold is a non-issue in practice. If they're not, it's worth knowing that going in rather than assuming you can tune it.
What to actually do with the number
"Unassigned over SLA" isn't just a diagnostic for right now — watched over time, it's a staffing signal. If that number is consistently nonzero at certain hours, pair it with hourly load data (see the guide on reading your inbox's real bottlenecks) to check whether your agent shifts actually cover your busiest hours, or whether routing rules are sending too much volume to a team that's thin at that time of day.