Date Published March 22, 2017 - Last Updated December 6, 2017
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been part of life at the support center for a very long time. Do they have real value? Do we consistently measure against them? How often are they reevaluated?
Right off the bat, Aale Roos (@aalem) reminded us that SLAs are there as “training wheels.” They establish a minimum level of service, and breaches of SLA are failures to provide that minimum. Many SLAs are there to control costs for the organization, said Justin Robbins (@justinmrobbins). Sanjeev NC (@yenceesanjeev) imagined a call to an empty queue that didn’t require a response for four hours.
The HDI 2016 Technical Support Practices & Salary Report tells us that one-third of support centers have multiple SLAs. Tweets in the chat describe different ways of defining them. In one organization, customers purchase different service plans. In another, incidents and service requests each have their own SLA.
Read the transcript and consider how SLAs are currently affecting your service.
Join us again this Friday, for our next #HDIchat!
Roy Atkinson is HDI's senior writer/analyst, acting as in-house subject matter expert and chief writer for SupportWorld articles and white papers. In addition to being a member of the HDI International Certification Standards Committee and the HDI Desktop Support Advisory Board, Roy is a popular speaker at HDI conferences and is well known to HDI local chapter audiences. His background is in both service desk and desktop support as well as small-business consulting. Roy is highly rated on social media, especially on the topics of IT service management and customer service. He is a cohost of the very popular #custserv (customer service) chat on Twitter, which celebrated its fifth anniversary on December 9, 2014. He holds a master’s certificate in advanced management strategy from Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, and he is a certified HDI Support Center Manager. Follow him on Twitter @HDI_Analyst and @RoyAtkinson.