What is an SLA?
A service level agreement is a promise with a clock attached. Most of the confusion around them comes from two words that sound similar and mean very different things.
The definition
An SLA is an agreement about the quality of a service – in support, almost always about time. It says how quickly you will react and how quickly you will finish, and it is only meaningful if both sides know which is which.
Response time is not resolution time
Response time is how long until a person answers. Not an automatic acknowledgement – a human saying "I have this."
Resolution time is how long until the problem is gone. It depends on the problem, which is why sensible agreements attach it to priority rather than promising one number for everything.
Almost every argument about a missed SLA is really an argument about which of these two was agreed.
Business hours change everything
"Four hours" means something very different depending on whether the clock runs at 11pm on a Saturday. Agreements should say the working hours they are measured against, and the system should count the same way.
Without that, a Friday-evening ticket is a breach by Monday morning and nobody did anything wrong.
What happens when one is missed
Two things should. First, it should be visible before it happens – a warning, not a post-mortem. Second, there should be an agreed escalation: who is told, and what changes. An SLA with no consequence is a number in a document.
How to set them up in practice is in setting up SLAs; the escalation side is in escalation management.
Try rapidFOX free for 7 days
Help desk software with a local AI – GDPR compliant, hosted in Germany. No card, ready in 2 minutes.
Start free nowCommon questions
Does an automatic acknowledgement count as a response?
It should not. The point of a response time is that a person has taken the case, and an autoresponder has not.
Should we have different SLAs per customer?
If your contracts differ, yes – with one standard class for everyone without a specific agreement.
What is a realistic first-response time?
For most B2B support, four business hours is ambitious and achievable. One hour is a staffing decision, not a configuration one.
Do we need an SLA at all?
Even without a contract, an internal target is useful – it is the difference between "we are quite fast" and knowing.
Read on
Setting up SLAs in practice: which classes to define, how to pick times you can keep, how...
Practical ways to answer faster: where the time actually goes, what to fix first, and the...
How to prioritise support tickets: impact against urgency, why everything becomes high pri...
How escalation actually works in support: when to escalate, to whom, what changes as a res...