5 Most Critical MSP Metrics Series – SLA Compliance

If Customer Satisfaction is the new currency for service providers, SLA compliance is the money manager that drives maximum return. Every claim you make while selling a product or service must be validated. This validation can come from customers, 3rd parties, or things like guarantees. As a service provider, SLA’s are your guarantees to customers that they can trust you and depend on you. Contracts can be breached based on missed SLA’s, and often times, you have to pay customers for SLA misses which impacts margin, profit, and churn. With so much on the line, you can’t afford mistakes in the real-time tracking and execution of your SLA’s.

Like the other metrics discussed thus far, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to accurately tracking SLA compliance. SLA’s are in fact one of the more difficult metrics to accurately present, and there are actually two keys to SLA Management – Setting it up accurately in the first place and making them visible and trackable in real time.
Setting SLA’s up accurately from the beginning relies heavily on your understanding of internal processes and procedures translate into what constitutes a response versus a resplan (excludes time against the ticket for things like holds, or waiting for client responses). Coordinating your customer’s experience with the implementation of your tracking system or PSA is usually the hardest part. If a customer opens a ticket and receives an email that says “We have opened a ticket for you and here is your ticket number”, does this qualify as a response? Before you answer too quickly, it depends on what expectations you have created for your customers and what is agreed to in your contract.

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