IT Support Service Level Agreements

SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) essentially represent our promise to deal with your ICT issues and requests within a given time frame.

They show that we have an efficient and mature process for providing IT support and that you can have confidence in us.

The Basics

Our SLAs depend on the agreed hours cover and the priority of your issue or request.

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

Standard Hours of cover

While many clients have extended and out-of-hours of support, our standard cover runs from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm (GMT/BST), from Monday to Friday, but excluding public holidays for England.
Our monitoring service runs 24x7x365 and major issues are dealt with by our out-of-hours incident team regardless of your cover, and you can elect to increase cover for critical systems if you wish.
Our SLA timers run only during your agreed hours of cover.

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: urgency and impact.

Urgency

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:

	HIGH Urgency	MEDIUM Urgency	LOW Urgency
HIGH Impact	Priority 1	Priority 2	Priority 3
MEDIUM Impact	Priority 2	Priority 3	Priority 4
LOW Impact	Priority 3	Priority 4	Priority 4

In our experience most issues fall into priority 3, 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 good reason, if you have made us aware of it.

The clock is ticking

We have various clocks (timers) running on every ticket you raise, though most of our clients are only interested in one of them (“respond within”).

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.

“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.

Respond Within	Respond Within
Priority 1	30 working minutes
Priority 2	1 working hour
Priority 3	2 working hours
Priority 4	4 working hours
Request	8 working hours

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)
Request – A user requires access to a shared mailbox and so a permission change is required

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 supply of parts or arrangements with you for collections and returns, so we usually allocate a request priority for these jobs after we have received the hardware in our workshop.
Quotes – we have no timers on these requests, but we do our best to be prompt and keep you fully up to date.
3rd Party Incident Liaison – Response will be based on the SLAs set by the particular 3rd party but we will aim to provide a progress update at least once a day