How MSPs Achieve Great Service Level Agreements
If you are a mature Managed IT Service Provider (MSP) a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a key metric to measure.
Why? An SLA commits your business to an acceptable level of service to your clients. Few things drive a client crazier than submitting a ticket and having it disappear into a black hole. Non-responsive support is a short road to dissatisfied clients. Agreed-upon SLAs help frame expectations, while communication manages these expectations.
Once you have SLAs in place, you can work towards consistently exceeding them to wow your clients with world-class service!
Why are SLAs important to your customers?
Why are SLAs important to your customers?
An SLA is typically written into the contract and may include cost clawbacks. In the IT service space, this often isn’t the case due to the unpredictable nature of another company's infrastructure. Regardless, an SLA is a contractual obligation, and repeated breaches can terminate the agreement.
The importance of having an SLA lies in defining expected turnaround times for support:
8 hours for most support issues
4 hours for urgent issues
1 hour for emergency issues
Communicate these SLAs to primary client contacts and users to curb issues where someone submits a ticket and storms off to their boss after an hour of waiting.
Never make your customer wait!
As a service organization first and a technology company second, how long a person waits for service is a tangible measure of quality. Communication is critical to effectively manage expectations around SLAs.
How long a person waits for service is a very tangible measure of the quality of service a person receives. Think of all the places that are notorious for poor services, the DMV, Call-Centers, food service. "We've waited 15 minutes and no one has come to the table." "I'm number 214. They are currently seeing number 167." "We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes." I have a question, when are they not experiencing higher than normal call volumes? The theme is the same, people hate waiting. People especially hate waiting when they have no feedback to manage their expectations.
Communication is critical to effectively managing expectations around SLAs. If you are a ConnectWise user, Brightgauge has a great visual guide on setting up SLAs, and provides a great monitor of SLA performance.
Always work to overachieve on your SLAs
World-class IT service companies achieve SLA >90% of the time, while average achievement is around 75%. Underperforming companies are at 50% or below.
With this reference, let’s explore strategies to help you overachieve in the eyes of the client!
1. Manage the psychological contract
If a user is upset about how long something took to fix, NEVER dismiss their concern with, "This was completed within the SLA." Communication is key. Direct contact and regular updates maintain user expectations and accountability.
Communication is the key to managing the psychological contract with the user. Acknowledging a support request with an auto-responder does little to dampen the client’s concern, it only acknowledges that an email or ticket submission was received. Auto-responders should not be used as a measure of response time.
Direct contact is a far better measure. It may look something like this, "Hi Jane, I understand from your ticket that you're having trouble opening an attachment. I've scheduled a tech to review your request and you should hear back from them in 2 hours." You've now acknowledged the issue and scheduled time for follow-up. This allows the user to expect when they will hear from someone.
The trick to this is maintaining that expectation and following through with the communication. Regular updates will buy you grace from the user, but not indefinitely. One of the best ways to manage this accountability to tickets is a dispatcher. Someone that can focus on juggling support requests, who those requests get delegated to and assisting with client communication.
2. Repeatable process
First call resolution streamlines techs’ and clients’ time. Structured documentation and standard operating procedures (SOPs) help manage common issues effectively, reducing errors and improving client perception.
Most of the issues that techs face are not some rare event that no one has ever seen before. In fact, most support issues are recurrences of a previous issue. Having a clean and easy to navigate documentation system like IT Glue™ drastically reduces the burden on techs of searching for the information.
SOPs act as a script for resolving typical issues or executing procedures. So rather than each tech re-inventing the wheel for each problem, a repository of information exists for them to reference. This is especially important in:
system builds (server/laptop/desktop)
application installation
user creation/decommission
These procedures get done a lot and have detailed requirements. Just allowing staff to wing it on each one will inevitably lead to error, which increases the time required through re-work or escalation. Missing details from a SOP can also create a poor perception with a client. "You guys have done this dozens of times. How come you get it wrong so often?"
Distill the knowledge from your team's experience into SOPs. This will reduce the time spent looking for a solution and therefore the resolve that issue.
3. Escalation path
First call resolution streamlines techs’ and clients’ time. Structured documentation and standard operating procedures (SOPs) help manage common issues effectively, reducing errors and improving client perception.
Great team members will often hold a high degree of personal accountability for the issues that they are given. They truly want to be able to solve the problem and help the client.
The dispatcher also plays a support role in keeping the team accountable to the escalation times and ensuring communication to the client. The service manager should be reviewing the tickets that miss the SLA and determine if there is an opportunity to update or create a SOP that would make that type of ticket easier in the future.
4. Low costs, high value
Focusing on reducing escalations drives up first call resolution numbers. Tier 1 technicians, costing significantly less, can close many more tickets. Clean documentation sets them up for success.
Listen to the Podcast: “ERP096 - How To Think About Security
In this episode, learn how effective security measures can enhance your service delivery and build stronger client trust, key components of successful SLAs!
Here are the costs to demonstrate why this is important:
Tier 3s cost $75,000 - $80,000 a year. They tend to deal with complex issues and thus close fewer tickets in a day, say 5-8 tickets.
Tier 1s cost $35,000 - $40,000 a year. They should be closing 15-20 tickets a day.
Therefore: 2 x Tier 1 techs who cost no more than $80,000 = 40 Tickets per day!
This means the tier 1 approach is guaranteed to drive better results and help achieve your SLA goals.
Clean and logical documentation is critical to ensure the tier 1 technicians are being set up for success. It starts with team member onboarding. One of the reasons more seasoned technicians can resolve issues is that they know where to look. A good documentation system will ensure techs have a clear view of the client environment, assets, dependencies and other related information. There are a number of options available such as Dropbox, Google Drive, using your RMM or PSA, or IT Glue.
The on-ramp time for new people that have access to the collective knowledge of the team will also be dramatically higher. This is preferable to new folks having to rely on a steady drip of experience with each environment.
Finally, since the team knowledge is captured, the tier 1s are more likely to be able to close issues on the first call. These quick closes mean SLAs are exceeded, clients are happy that they don’t have to wait and high-performance team members feel the success of blasting through issues while getting high-quality feedback scores on their work.
This post orginally appeared as a guest blog on the IT Glue website.
