SLA Service Level Agreement

DoubleD

I noticed on most job applications they ask that you follow the SLA but I just wondered what this means to follow the SLA?

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider (either internal or external) and the end user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider.

How many peoples roles stay true to the SLA is it a strict code or just something that's put out there that no one really seems to care about?

and what happens if you are in a role and you don't hit the SLA? will it matter? will you get fired?

EANx

My employer has several groups that have various SLAs. When it's an external service provider, missing the SLA in the broad sense can mean the service provider misses an incentive payment. The questions to ask relate to how many types of SLAs are there and what are their durations? Creating an account might have an SLA of two hours after it's received but a desktop problem might be eight business hours. Ask about ticket transfer, ask about clock time vs you-in-the-office time (If you leave at 5 and a ticket arrives in your queue at 4 and you don't solve it by 5, what happens?). How does the company deal with a missed SLA? Who is monitoring SLAs? Are there different groups? What happens if a different group transfers a ticket right before the SLA expires, who gets the hit?

DatabaseHead

Follow an SLA means to stay within tolerance of the SLA. Whatever is agreed upon

90% or >, you'll need to remain above that, such as up time etc..... (This could be an OLA as well since you owe the other departments this level of quality).

Average handle time (AHT) with in seconds needs to be below 580 per call. This would be an individual SLA for a Rep, this is providing a service directly to a customer.

Our ops teams has to make sure the chains run within a 7 hour window or they breach "SLA", that's technically an OLA, but nobody calls it that.

Normally if you breach SLA from an individual level, you'll be coached for that specific metric. For instance you may take the most calls, resolve the most issues, but stay in after call a lot. They will put up your "Scorecard" review your metrics and try to build a corrective plan to help you become "better".

Most of the time (from what I have seen) from both a call metric phone system such as Avaya and Cisco +/- 5% is usually the norm based of the total average. If you are in the 95 percentile you get an atta boy, and vice versa......

Rarely does someone breach them all, it's usually in one area, such as someone staying in after call too long after a call is wrapped up....

You can see these KPI's aka SLA's (again different but used synonymously) for accounting teams when reconciling accounts or time to collect. Time to invoice etc.....

Most of the time these "SLA's" are applied to operational folks....

My sole purpose (at times) is to transform transactional system data into insights for managers and it's usually around SLA's or KPI's (which the executives on the business side refer to it as).

N7Valiant

DoubleD wrote: »

I noticed on most job applications they ask that you follow the SLA but I just wondered what this means to follow the SLA?

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider (either internal or external) and the end user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider.

How many peoples roles stay true to the SLA is it a strict code or just something that's put out there that no one really seems to care about?

and what happens if you are in a role and you don't hit the SLA? will it matter? will you get fired?

Depends on when it's convenient I guess.

The SLA might provide for 2 hours response time but that doesn't mean you won't be playing 20 questions if it takes more than 15 minutes to get a password reset because somebody dropped the ball on the admin creds.


But that would be a week after management points out that you have 2 hours "just to respond" to a service request and not necessarily resolve it.


Speaking strictly from a technical standpoint, having the SLA be strictly enforced is something that wouldn't be so bad if it were strictly enforced consistently and we didn't carve out exceptions left and right just because the customer whined a little and demanded that you do things regularly outside of support hours and they don't want to pay extra for that support.