Is attending to your customers’ incidents and requirements, meeting response, and resolution times your priority? Then find out what IT support SLAs are and why they are a crucial part of your business.

Establishing them will allow you to offer optimal service and bring effective solutions. In addition, compliance, and monitoring of these Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are crucial to achieving essential performance. In this way, operational efficiency starts with the timely management of incidents that impact your business.

Guaranteeing your client’s satisfaction and maintaining the relationship with them is fundamental. For this reason, customer service support is crucial, and SLA divisions include different aspects. For example, response time and problem resolution, depending on the objectives and agreements negotiated with the company and the essential requirements for providing the service.

In that sense, the IT support SLAs are contracts that benefit both sides (provider and client). The reason is that they stipulate predictable, measurable service levels and offer more visibility to emerging problems (Hammond, 2021).

The number of companies that reach the best practices of ITIL in SLAs is increasing. For this reason, in the following sections, we will elaborate on these agreements, how they work, and how to track them in your business.

IT support SLAs: what are they and what are they for?

Talking about IT support SLAs implies the rise of important values like trust, responsibility, commitment, competitivity, and transparency. All this interferes with the quality of the services offered and determines if expectations are or are not achieved. Therefore, the SLAs allow fulfilling tasks and deadlines.

A concept that thoroughly explains what they are and what they are used for is this: SLAs are contracts where a company and its clients establish responsibilities and obligations. They are for determining the expectations to reach between both and guarantee the quality of the services offered, among other matters (Hammond, 2021).

Let’s take the above to day-to-day life to know how they benefit you and why you should create them. Then, we will list some of the advantages of IT support SLAs.

7 benefits of having IT support SLAs

Nowadays, many companies are implementing their IT support SLAs to obtain different outreach and services results. According to Hammond (2021), their implementation brings to your company these benefits:

• Increase customer satisfaction because it brings structure, order, and continuous improvement.
• Establish responsibilities and transparency commitments between the provider company and the client.
• Offers guidelines and realistic expectations of the service between both parties to keep the relationship and the established agreements.
• Incidents and events manage efficiently to the agreed standards.
• Enhances the answer time and problem solution in the support area.
• Defines actions to take in case of adverse situations and unexpected events —for example, delays or failures to comply with deadlines.
• Increase trust in the quality levels of offered services.

Indicators for evaluating the achievement of IT support SLAs

In all support, levels are contemplated in SLAs, according to the task complexity and the answer time. Therefore, it is possible to include service delivery requirements to incident management among the agreements. We know that evaluating these aspects is a challenge for companies. For this reason, we are going to talk about indicators. The metrics that you can analyze to measure your service management.

We can see how companies from diverse industries (technology, e-commerce, services, retail, banks) are implementing SLAs in different fields, basing their monitoring on the client’s SLAs, the service, or both; this is multi-level.

Measuring the efficacy of IT support SLAs is critical. Therefore, they consider diverse factors. Do you want to know those indicators to measure the efficiency and performance of your team? According to Murphy (2021), these are some parameters that are used to tell if what is being done meets expectations:

1. Reference points: checking the incidents and current tickets allow us to evaluate the opportunities to enhance and grow.
2. Stock lists: analyzing problems, equipment, or available stock will help you manage your activities effectively.
3. SLAs: examining your contracts is fundamental to evaluating the relationship with your providers and clients. So, you will meet the expectations and requirements to offer an optime service.
4. The root cause of incidents: managing the problem source properly brings you possibilities to prevent future occurrences.
5.  Ration servers and services: detecting the equipment’s deficiencies impulses the efficient management of your technological resources.

Keep reading you want to know how to enhance your IT support SLAs through good practice execution! In this manner you will optimize your services, satisfying your client’s needs and final users.

Good practices to enhance SLAs

As a manager or area director, we know that you are looking for options to optimize the experience and satisfaction of your clients. Before implementing compatible software applications and other technological resources in your company, you must evaluate different aspects.

Contracting a service that provides added-value, quality service, and user support is the promise. Accomplishing it is a challenge! This is even more critical when consolidating strategic and collaborative processes. In these cases, it boosts efficiency in work teams and increases competitiveness in your company.

An example of that is the development and support teams that complement each other’s efforts, despite working separately. Although the tasks of a subcontracted developer are not the same as the functions of an IT support analyst, both are together to reach the same objective. To consolidate a project and boost the operative performance of offered services.

To enounce the collaborative work, there are some SLAs tracking reporting tools and indicators of SLAs status. These will allow you to monitor the incidents and detect problems in the offered service of different areas.

Your objective is to enhance and achieve the previously established IT support SLAs. To reach it, you must know the steps to follow for meeting them with the desired speed and effectiveness. Now, let’s see what best practices are and how you can monitor them in your company (Milvus, 2018).

1. Using monitor tools

Achieving SLAs is possible due to implementing innovative resources of monitoring for managers. The intervention of the project manager and the product owner is vital to a strategical approach. Encourage yourself to include them! It will facilitate the daily tasks of project review and management.

2. Having SLAs for each provider.

Establish clear and specific parameters for each supplier from the beginning. If you do it right, it will help you maintain a transparent relationship with your customer. Defining the scope of the offered service and the expected results will allow you to:

• Accomplish the IT support SLAs.
• Project real expectations.
• Reduce the misunderstanding or lack of information between both parties.

Making agreements understandable

Clearly and quickly, defining your IT support SLAs and the expectations in the established agreements eases communication and execution of tasks. All parties must understand that the signalized aspects are fundamental. In this way, it is necessary to establish an accurate, natural, and authentic level of service.

As you can see, to offer efficient services, it is essential to create, monitor, and enhance your IT support SLAs. This will contribute to the IT clients’ and users’ attention quality; also, it boosts the operativity and optimization of productive processes that make your company grow.