SLA clock pause while ticket status is "Waiting on contact"

Outcome. Time spent waiting on the customer to reply stops counting against the team's SLA, and the portal keeps a visible record of how long each waiting period actually lasted, instead of the clock (or the team's sense of how long they took) treating that time as their own delay.

Workflow map Enrollment, branches and actions at a glance tickets-sla-020

flowchart TD
    A[Ticket status = Waiting on contact] --> B[Stamp waiting_on_contact_since]
    B --> C[Increment waiting_on_contact_rounds]
    C --> D{Wait until event: status changes away - expires in 30 days}
    D -->|status changed| E[End - normal path, native SLA pause already applied while waiting]
    D -->|expired, still waiting| F[Add to Long-waiting tickets - review list]

When to use it, when not to

• UseUse it once your ticket pipeline stages are mapped to HubSpot's ticket status categories (Open, Waiting on contact, Waiting on us, Closed), since the actual SLA pause is a native platform behavior tied to that category, not something a workflow creates from scratch.
• UseUse it when the team wants visibility into how much time tickets actually spend waiting, for coaching or process review, on top of the native pause.
• SkipDo not use it expecting this workflow to be what pauses the SLA; if your pipeline stages are not mapped to the "Waiting on contact" status category, no amount of workflow logic recreates that native pause, fix the pipeline mapping first (check in your portal: confirm current status category configuration path, Settings > Objects > Tickets > Pipelines, or the newer Help Desk pipeline settings).
• SkipDo not use it if you have no interest in reporting on waiting time; the native pause already happens on its own regardless of whether this workflow exists.