SimDeskEvery IT services company signs SLAs. Far fewer can prove, at the end of the month, which ones were met. The gap is rarely effort — the engineers were working. It is that the clock on a ticket does not match what the contract actually promised.
Separate the two clocks
A response SLA and a resolution SLA measure different things and fail for different reasons. Response is about staffing and routing; resolution is about skills, spares and dependencies. Report them separately or you will keep treating a staffing problem as a technical one.
Decide what pauses the clock, in writing
- Waiting on the customer for information, access or a downtime window.
- Outside the contracted support window — an 09:00–18:00 contract should not accrue breach at 02:00.
- Waiting on a third party you do not control, such as an ISP or an OEM RMA.
- Nothing else. Every extra pause reason is a place the number can be argued with later.
Give priority a definition, not a dropdown
Priority decides the clock, so it cannot be a matter of taste. Tie it to impact and urgency: how many people are stopped, and whether there is a workaround. Written that way, a junior engineer and the customer will usually agree on the priority — and the SLA stops being a monthly argument.
Log the work where the clock is
The commonest cause of an unprovable SLA is work that happened somewhere else: a remote session on a personal tool, a fix discussed over WhatsApp, a bug raised in a separate tracker. If the evidence is not attached to the ticket, the ticket cannot defend itself in a review.
This is the practical reason we build remote support into the ticket rather than beside it. The session starts from the ticket, the recording comes back to it, and the bug raised from it keeps the customer context — so the SLA report is assembled from what actually happened, not from memory.
Review the breaches, not just the percentage
- Group breaches by cause: routing, staffing, skills, spares, customer delay.
- Look at the tickets that were reopened — a met SLA that failed the customer is worse than a missed one.
- Check the tickets nobody breached because nobody logged them. Walk-ups and phone calls are where SLAs quietly die.
None of this needs a bigger tool. It needs one place where the ticket, the work, the evidence and the clock live together — which is the whole argument for running support on one platform rather than three.