IT Service Level Agreements – Making Sure You Meet Them
IT service level agreements are a necessary evil for all professional IT support providers.
As well as keeping your customers happy, consistently meeting your IT service level agreements provides you with a good marketing pitch to new customers. Being able to say that “all of our customers enjoy 99.9% uptime” is never a bad thing!
So how should you ensure that you consistently meet your company’s IT service level agreements?
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Build Realistic SLAs: When you define IT service level agreements with your customers, ensure that you set realistic targets. If clients expect extremely high levels of system availability, don’t be afraid to highlight the fact that they may need to invest in redundancy and resilience features to make this achievable.
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Ensure Customers Understand: Take the time to go through IT service level agreements with each of your customers and ensure that they understand the content. For example, it can come as quite a surprise to some clients how much downtime is allowed for if you agree to 99% availability.
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Monitor SLAs: Keep an accurate log of your adherence to SLAs and frequently submit this to your customers. SLA dashboard software solutions can help with this.
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Be Sure that Client Obligations are Clear: If your SLAs include problem resolution times, make sure that your customers are aware of their responsibilities in terms of logging faults in a timely fashion and in the correct manner.
How do you ensure that you continually adhere to your company’s IT service level agreements? Share your strategies in the comments box below.
And to follow-through on the ideas introduced in this short post, be sure to download your free copy of the special report on IT Service Contract Secrets for Getting More Repeat Clients and Recurring Service Revenue.
Creative Commons Image Source: flickr Jemimus