SLA & Tiered Service Levels

SLA - this is a difficult one.  You obviously want to offer all of your customers the premier, best in the world, platinum level of service, but unfortunately that does not always make financial sense.  Customers need to be tiered dependent on the amount of money they pay you (see my post on the 80/20/30 rule) and incidents/problems need to be tiered dependent on the impact to their business.  

It makes for an interesting measurement or matrix but a basic one that will need to be customized for your business is provided below.

	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3
Priority 1	70% + Service Impact or Total Loss of Service 5min Response 4hr Resolution	70% + Service Impact or Total Loss of Service 30min Response 8hr Resolution	70% + Service Impact or Total Loss of Service 1hr Response 24hr Resolution
Priority 2	50% - 70% Service Impact 15min Response 8hr Resolution	50% - 70% Service Impact 1hr Response 24hr Resolution	50% - 70% Service Impact 4hr Response 72hr Resolution
Priority 3	Up to 50% Service Impact 30min Response 12hr Resolution	Up to 50% Service Impact 4hr Response 72hr Resolution	Up to 50% Service Impact 24hr Response 96hr Resolution

Please note the difference here between 'Response' time and 'Resolve' time!!  Make sure that you use this to your effect as problems cannot generally be resolved immediately on 1st contact ... work to analyse the problem takes time.  Don't kid yourself otherwise!

As you can see from the table/matrix mentioned above (hope its not too confusing?) reading from Top Left -> Bottom Right your SLA follows a specified path.  Dependent on the Tier of your customer and the impact to their business a specified service level is offered to them.

A key point to make is that the SLA needs to be something that is achievable - having a customer facing SLA that is more stringent than your own internal OLA (the service level offered by your own internal departments) is doomed to failure and unfortunately some fairly large financial repercussions!