Creating service level agreements (SLAs) isn't the most glamorous element of an MSP's job, but it's vital to the customer relationship. Here is more information about the essential practices of an SLA in detail.
Being careful about Service Level Agreement is always suitable for organisations that work with IT services and cloud providers. It is even more critical than ever to know how to talk about these metrics with other people, structure them, manage them, measure them, and show them to other people.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the stakes in the management of SLAs, as well. As more and more IT functions are spread out, SLAs have become the primary way to measure how well things are going.
In the past, SLAs have been a source of disagreement between service providers, their customers, and the businesses that use them. In addition, SLA development and management have changed a lot in the last few years, intending to maximise business value in mind.
Why is SLA Important?
These rules aren’t all that SLAs are. They’re not just a list of things that must happen. They are an essential part of protecting your business, keeping customers happy by managing their expectations, and reducing the risk of a dispute. To help MSPs, here is a list of why SLAs are so critical.
1. Service Level Agreement Clarify Accountability
Setting an SLA helps you manage customer expectations and clear up who is responsible by giving your customers a clear idea of where your responsibilities start and end. This helps keep customers from blaming you for things that aren’t your fault or out of your control.
2. SLA’s Decide the Boundaries
There are a lot of things that an MSP might have to take care of for a customer when they provide IT services. However, there are going to be a lot of systems that don’t fall under your purview.
There may be line-of-business applications that have their support contracts and print devices that a copier company supports. SLA agreement lets you say what is and isn’t your job.
3. SLA’s Save Your Time
Whenever you have a customer relationship, there will always be people who have unrealistic expectations of you and ask for more of your time than they should be able to. In order to protect the personal time of MSP technicians, an SLA agreement can show which days and hours you agreed to help.
It all comes down to how well you follow the terms of your service level agreement (SLA) with your MSP. You can write the SLA before you even start working with a customer. This means that you can write the SLA before you even begin working with a customer. To make sure that you’re writing the best SLAs possible.
Basic Practices Used by Every SLA
1. Establish a Clear Service Definition
It will be different for each customer. IT assets may belong to you, but not all of them. So that there’s no question about what you’re responsible for if there’s a problem, your SLA agreement must say which assets you’re responsible for.
Make sure to be very specific and clear when you describe these assets and services to your customer, so there aren’t any gaps.
2. Be Sure to Set Clear Reporting Expectations
Your customers must know how to get in touch with you if they have a problem. There are many ways that you can get in touch with us. You might prefer to talk to us on the phone, by text, email, or by chat.
If you tell customers what this means, you’ll make sure that no one forgets about it and that you can keep track of everything in a well-organised way. If customers don’t understand what the SLA means, they should also be taught about it. For example, they should know the difference between ‘Response time’ and ‘Time to resolution’.
3. Inclusion of Real Performance and Metric Benchmark
Every SLA should include specific performance metrics, like how long a device is up and how quickly it responds to problems.
Customers can easily understand these numbers and know how much they can expect from your service because they are simple and accurate. Metrics should be real, easy to measure, and relevant.
4. Educate Your Customers About MTBF and MTTF
Including MTBF/MTTF in your MSP SLA agreement is a good idea, but your customers will likely need to understand what it means. MTBF/MTTF is a way to measure how long it has been since something went wrong. It is called ‘Meantime between failures’ if the system can be fixed (MTBF).
MTTF is the ‘Meantime to failure’ when the system can’t be saved. Making sure your customers know how often problems happen in a system or how often they need to be replaced can help them understand how often things need to be changed.
5. To Teach the Customer About MTTR
Another vital thing to teach your customers is the MTTR. This metric is called the ‘Mean time to fix’, and it is a number. Everything should be fixed as quickly as possible when something goes wrong. There was an outage, and it took a long time to get it all back up and running again.
This number should be as low as possible. The lower the number, the faster your MSP comes up with a solution. In this case, setting realistic expectations can help keep your customers from becoming impatient as they wait for an issue to be solved.
6. A Clause That Says “The Customer Will Be Compensated” Should Be Included
In the event that a Service Level Agreement is broken in some way, there will be consequences. When your customers know what to do if your company does something wrong, they know that you can be held accountable.
A good SLA usually comes with a money-back guarantee. For example, if certain violations happen, you might get a 5% discount on the next month’s service fee.
Conclusion
An MSP SLA is in place to protect both your business and your customer’s business. It sets expectations, commits your services to a certain level of quality, and lessens the chances of disagreements which can lead to customer dissatisfaction, by setting rules.
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