What should our DM response time SLA be for clients?

Split it by message type instead of picking one number for everything: a tighter target for a lead or a complaint, a looser one for a general question, and a stated floor (same business day) for all of it. Write down the business hours the SLA covers and what happens outside them, since an unstated gap is where clients feel ignored.

Most agencies get this wrong the same way: they promise one response time, "we reply within an hour," and apply it to every DM across every client. That breaks fast, because not every DM carries the same cost of waiting. A lead asking about pricing decays by the hour. A complaint left on read turns into a public comment. A general question about hours can wait until the next check-in without anyone feeling abandoned.

So the SLA isn't one number, it's a small table. Decide which message types get the fastest response (leads, partnership inquiries, anything that reads as upset), give those a tighter target, and give everything else a same-business-day floor. Then pick a number your team can actually staff to: a target you can't hit on your busiest Monday isn't a commitment, it's a promise you've already broken.

Define what counts as a response, too: a real acknowledgment from a human, not an autoresponder, and not resolution. "We got this, give us until Thursday" counts. Write the SLA down somewhere the client has seen it, ideally at kickoff, so a slow week reads as an exception instead of a pattern they weren't told about.

Then track it: median time to first response, and the percentage of messages that missed the target, both weekly. They tend to slip together, usually right when posting volume rises, which is exactly when a client starts noticing how fast you reply.

The full method is in How to Set DM Response-Time SLAs Your Agency Can Actually Hit.