SLA Compliance in Action

Last week we discussed the importance of SLA compliance and how to accurately track. The post ended with a question – Does an automated email qualify as a response? We begin this weeks post with more on that question and finish with an example of SLA Compliance in action!
For our organization, an email is only a response if it is caused by human intervention. Even so, it isn’t the most important metric that we measure in our SLA management. A three to five minute response time looks really good in a marketing document, but what would your customer say is your actual response time? We have found that time to customer interaction is probably the most critical element of the SLA. The Resplan time is what we refer to as the “Customers Felt Response”, or when there is engagement between the customer and someone who can resolve their problem. As long as we continually communicate with our customer and keep them informed of progress, the resolution time isn’t typically as important as time to customer interaction and Resplan time.

Once your SLA compliance process has been setup correctly and integrated into your PSA and RMM solutions, you must be able to visualize and gauge your historical and current performance against SLA targets. Finding out about a missed SLA last week through a report this week can mean the difference between keeping and churning a customer, which makes immediate visualization a necessity for any service provider. Possibly even more critical is the ability to track where all of your tickets are at any time in relation to the associated SLA. This is where one of my favorite ConnectSMART gadgets comes into play. The SLA By Status gadget gives you a real-time visualization of all of your tickets against your SLA buckets. Since the first two SLA buckets, Response and Resplan Time, do not typically require an engineer there is no excuse for ever missing them. It doesn’t really matter how many tickets have not been responded to or hit resplan as long as the ticket is “in the green”. Having your entire team able to see this visually at any time means they can grab the tickets that are in danger (in the orange or yellow areas) to prevent them from turning red.

This level of visibility across all SLA tickets and all priorities gives you the tools you need to never miss an SLA again and ensure your customers are satisfied and sticky.

If you missed the 30-minute hang where (customer name) discussed how they gauge and grade their business in real time every day through ConnectSMART, watch the recording now!