How to alert your support lead in Slack when Gorgias tickets approach their SLA deadline

Why monitor SLA breaches proactively?

Most support teams only discover SLA breaches after the fact — in a weekly report or when a customer complains about slow response times. By then the damage is done: the customer has already waited too long, and the breach is already on your scorecard. Teams that rely on retroactive SLA reporting typically breach 15-25% of their targets, while teams with proactive alerting keep breaches under 5%.

Proactive SLA monitoring flips the dynamic. Instead of reviewing breaches retroactively, your team lead gets a Slack alert while there's still time to act — reassign the ticket to an available agent, escalate it, or jump in directly. A 15-minute warning on a 4-hour SLA gives your team enough time to respond without rushing. The result is fewer breaches, faster response times, and a team that catches problems before customers feel them.

How it works

Regardless of which tool you use, every approach follows the same three-step pattern:

1. Check open tickets — find tickets that haven't received a first agent response yet and calculate how long they've been waiting.
2. Evaluate SLA risk — compare elapsed time against your SLA targets per channel (email, chat, etc.) and flag tickets where 75%+ of the window has elapsed.
3. Alert in Slack — post a warning with the customer name, channel, time remaining, SLA target, and a direct link to the ticket in Gorgias.

The approaches below differ in capability — Gorgias SLA Views provide passive monitoring, n8n sends automated alerts on a schedule, and the Claude Code skill adds conversational analysis and on-demand checks.

Which approach should I use?

• Gorgias SLA Views — native SLA tracking with filtered Views for at-risk and breached tickets. Best for small teams (under 50 tickets/day) where manual monitoring is feasible. Cannot send proactive Slack alerts — limited to dashboard visibility.
• n8n (Recommended) — a scheduled workflow polls the Gorgias API, calculates SLA risk, and sends Slack alerts automatically. Best for teams that need reliable, hands-off alerting. Free self-hosted or $24/mo on n8n Cloud.
• Claude Code — a guided Claude Code skill that checks SLA risk conversationally. You can ask "which tickets are closest to breaching?" or "check SLA for chat tickets only." Best for teams already using Claude Code who want on-demand analysis alongside scheduled alerts.

What you'll need

Choose your approach

Select an approach below to see the full step-by-step guide.