Service Level Agreements (SLA)

The Basics

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) essentially represent our promise to deal with your ICT related issues and requests within a given time frame. As a valued customer we want you to have total confidence in our efficient and established process for providing IT support.

The level of our SLAs depends on the agreed hours of cover and the priority of your issue or request.

We can provide bespoke SLAs to suit your specific needs. This can be extended hours of cover (24x7x365, weekends, public holidays), different speeds of response, priority, or cover for different types of equipment.

Standard Hours of cover

While many clients have extended and out-of-hours of support, our standard cover runs from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (GMT/BST), from Monday to Friday, but excluding public holidays for England.

Our monitoring service runs 24×7 and major issues are dealt with accordingly by our out-of-hours incident team.

Our SLA timers run only during your agreed hours of cover.

Our monitoring runs 24x7x365 regardless of your cover, so you can elect to increase cover for critical systems if you wish.

How we work out priorities

Our SLA timers also depend on the priority of your issue or request. When you raise a ticket with us, we make an assessment based on the information you have given us.

We let you know the priority we have assigned but are happy to take extenuating circumstances into account if you think we’ve got it wrong.

Priority is based on two factors: severity and impact.

Severity

Roughly, this is how many people are affected by the incident, e.g.

• LOW – one person or small group of people affected
• MEDIUM – department or large group of people affected
• HIGH – whole organisation is affected

Impact

Again, roughly speaking, this relates to how disruptive the incident is, e.g.

• LOW – there’s an easy and effective workaround, so this is more an irritation than a stoppage
• MEDIUM – operational efficiency is degraded, but there is either a reasonable workaround or other members of the team are unimpeded.
• HIGH – the issue is critical and one or more major business processes are stopped We then apply our priority matrix as follows:

Impact	High Severity	Medium Severity	Low Severity
High Impact	Priority 1	Priority 2	Priority 3
Medium Impact	Priority 2	Priority 3	Priority 4
Low Impact	Priority 3	Priority 4	Priority 5

In our experience most issues fall into priority 4, so that tends to be a default. The priority assigned dictates the amount of time we give ourselves to deal with your incident or request.

Overriding our priorities

We aim to be flexible and recognise that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. Perhaps the issue affects your customers, or key staff are having issues with a critical project with an impending deadline.

Our technicians are able to override our standard priority assessment where there is a good reason, if you have made us aware of it.

Three clocks are ticking

We have three clocks (timers) running on every ticket you raise, though most of our clients are only interested in two of them (respond within and resolve within).

Respond within

This is the maximum amount of time (within your hours of cover) that it should take us to get back to you and confirm who is dealing with your ticket – you get to speak to a trained technical expert straight away, rather than a recorded menu system or a call logger.

Plan within

This is more for our own use, to ensure that we’re on target to get the issue resolved on time.

Resolve within

This is the one that everyone is really interested in: the maximum time it should take to get everything up and running.

These timers represent maximums – we generally come well within these time limits.

In certain circumstances we will put a clock on hold – for example when we are awaiting a response from you with further information or an approval for work that may have a temporary impact on you or your business.

The goal percentage

Sometimes, with the best will in the world, and in spite of our best efforts, there are extenuating circumstances that mean the time limit is breached. This is exceptionally rare, but just to cover this we set a target goal percentage.

This is how many of your tickets we promise to achieve within the time limits. To date, we are well above these targets for all our clients!

Priority Type	Respond Within…	Plan Within…	Resolved Within…	Goal %
Priority 1	15 minutes	2 hours	4 hours	95%
Priority 2	1 hour	4 hours	8 hours	95%
Priority 3	2 hours	8 hours	16 hours	95%
Priority 4	2 hours	12 hours	24 hours	95%
Priority 5	8 hours	20 hours	40 hours	95%
Low Priority Admin	2 hours	8 hours	40 hours	95%

Some examples of priorities

Priority 1

Nobody can send or receive emails (everyone is affected, and a major business process is stopped)

Priority 2

Internet access for the whole company seems slower than usual (everyone is affected, and efficiency is degraded)

Priority 3

After the web browser has been upgraded for the company some of the shortcuts have disappeared (everyone is affected but there is an easy workaround)

Priority 4

Your computer is slow starting up in the morning, but everybody else is fine (your efficiency is lower but you’re the only person affected)

Priority 5

Someone is missing the shortcut everyone has to a shared folder, though they can save files to it by manually navigating to the folder (there’s a straightforward workaround, and only one person is affected)

Other exceptions to our priorities

The following are exceptions to our priorities and timers in the above matrix:

Paid workshop repairs – very often we’re dependent on the supply of parts or arrangements with you for collections and returns, so we usually allocate a priority of 5 for these jobs.

Quotes – we have no timers on these requests, but we do our best to be prompt and keep you fully up to date.

Low priority admin requests – these have response times that match priority 4 but a resolve time of a priority 5. Generally, we get plenty of advance notice and these requests are not urgent.