[Blog] Importance of SLA in an IT organization
Working in an IT Organization we often come across the term SLA "Service Level Agreement" A quick guide on SLA and its benefits.
SLA definition :
Service Level Agreement is usually a formal or informal agreement between the tool vendor and the end-user of the service. It provides a clear picture of the timeline for customer's expectations while contacting the support team.
When you purchase a new product let say a TV, which has a huge market. It's always tough to pick one. Some brands are top in the chart, however, they come with a huge price tag, some brand will have top-notch features, however, they might not have the brand value. A year ago I bought a brand new TV, it started flickering after 3 months of its purchase ( Our life is full of uncertainties ). I immediately got in touch with a support technician, he provided me a ticket and it had an SLA timeline of 10 hours, however, the support technician managed to fix the issue within a couple of hours. which made me happy. This incident can be taken as an example for SLA. In this scenario, they kept the SLA time transparent and the issue was fixed within the given timeline
Types of SLA:
Incident based SLA: Are usually defined for both internal and external users. This SLA sets the expectation and agreement on the ticket response time and resolution time. It also includes the escalations component for SLA violations.
Service-based SLA: Are usually used within the organization, it is based on the services offered by the IT team to the end-users. There's a slight difference between both the type of SLAs, where service SLA will have the focus on service delivery time and will have less importance on response time.
SLA benefits on an organization:
SLA report gives you better visibility on whether you are meeting the needs of your customers. A happy customer is always the best source of advertisement. SLA will help you to gauge the performance of the support technicians. Based on the user's feedbacks and escalations, you can improvise the standard of your support.
The key components on selecting a HelpDesk tool:
- Separate configuration for incident and service requests.
- The capability to configure SLA based on sites.
- An indicator to display the SLA violated tickets instantly.
- Easy SLA configuration.
- Multi-levels of SLA escalations with action to execute ( when a ticket is at the verge of SLA violation, the helpdesk should have capabilities to move the tickets to next tier/level )
- Should have proactive notification tools, which could notify the supervisor or manager before and after the ticket gets violated.
- Tool configuration that allows the managers to set SLA's irrespective of business hours, holidays or weekends for high priority and high impact incidents.