Engagement Models
Service Level Agreements and Support Tiers: What to Promise
Updated June 16, 2016By the CalliArc team
Key takeaway
Promise response times, not resolution times — you control when you reply, not how long a novel problem takes to fix. Define severity by business impact rather than by technical symptom, and make sure someone is actually rostered to meet every window you sell.
Support commitments are usually written during a sales negotiation and then discovered by the people who have to meet them. Getting the definitions right protects both sides, because a vague SLA is argued about at exactly the worst moment.
Define severity by impact
- Critical — the service is unavailable or unusable for most users, or data is at risk. No workaround.
- High — a major function is broken for many users, with a painful or partial workaround.
- Medium — a function is impaired, with a workaround, affecting some users.
- Low — cosmetic issues, questions, and requests.
- Write examples for each level. Without them, every customer's issue is critical, and the classification argument consumes the response window.
Response, update, resolution
- Response time — how quickly a human acknowledges and begins work. This is what you commit to.
- Update frequency during an incident, which is what customers actually judge you on.
- Resolution — commit to a target, not a guarantee, except for well-understood categories. Some faults take as long as they take.
- Workaround commitment can be a fair middle ground for high-severity issues.
Hours and coverage
- Be precise about business hours, time zone, and public holidays — and whose holidays.
- Out-of-hours cover requires an on-call rota with compensation, escalation, and a tested paging route. Don't sell it before it exists.
- State the channels: portal, email, phone, and which ones carry which severity.
- Cap what's included. Unlimited support on a fixed fee becomes unprofitable with the first demanding customer.
Make it measurable and honest
- Measure from the ticket's creation in the system, and say so — otherwise the clock start is disputed.
- Exclude time waiting on the customer for information, explicitly, with the pause visible on the ticket.
- Report performance against the SLA monthly, including misses. Transparency preserves more relationships than quiet failure does.
- If you offer service credits, keep them proportionate and automatic; credits that require a claim generate more resentment than goodwill.