Glossary · Customer Satisfaction
- Service Level Agreement
- Contractual commitments on response and resolution times. The service promise made explicit.
Service Level Agreements in Practice
Typical SLA Components
- Response time: How quickly you will reply to inquiries, segmented by priority
- Resolution time: How quickly you will resolve issues
- Uptime / availability: Platform availability percentage
- Scope: What counts as covered, what is excluded
Setting SLAs
Set SLAs you can consistently meet in the 95th percentile, not the average. After all, an SLA met on average but missed 20% of the time still damages trust. Therefore, build in headroom.
Track actual performance against SLA weekly. Typically, repeated breaches signal either under-capacity or a broken routing model, not a personnel problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
An SLA is contractual and externally visible; missing it has financial or legal consequences. An internal target is aspirational and used for operational management. Many teams conflate the two - and then set SLAs they cannot reliably meet.
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