Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define how we respond to your issues and requests. They reflect our reliability, efficiency and confidence in the support that we provide.

The Basics

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are our promise to deal with your ICT issues and support 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.

Our SLAs depend on the agreed hours cover and the priority of your issue. We can provide extended hours of cover (24x7x365, weekends, public holidays), with different speeds of response, priority or cover for different types of equipment. Just ask!

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: severity and impact.

Severity

Roughly, this is how many people are affected by the incident:

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:

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

Impact	Low Severity	Medium Severity	High Severity
High	Priority 3	Priority 2	Priority 1
Medium	Priority 4	Priority 3	Priority 2
Low	Priority 5	Priority 4	Priority 3

The Goal Percentage

Sometimes, and despite our best efforts, there are extenuating circumstances that mean the time limit is breached. This is exceptionally rare but just to cover this we set a target “goal %”.

This is how many of your tickets we promise to achieve within the time limits. To date we are well above these targets for all our clients, of course.

Priority Type	Respond Within…	Plan Within…	Resolve Within…	Goal %
Priority 1	1 hour	4 hours	8 hours	95%
Priority 2	1 hour	4 hours	8 hours	95%
Priority 3	1 hour	8 hours	16 hours	95%
Priority 4	2 hour	8 hours	16 hours	95%
Priority 5	8 hour	16 hours	40 hours	95%
Low Priority Admin	2 hour	8 hours	40 hours	95%

Standard Hours of Cover

Everything you need to know…

While many clients have extended and out-of-hours of support, our standard cover runs from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (GMT/BST), from Monday to Friday, but excluding public holidays for England.
Our monitoring service runs 24×7 and major issues are dealt with accordingly by our out-of-hours incident team.
Our SLA timers run only during your agreed hours of cover.
Our monitoring runs 24x7x365 regardless of your cover, so you can elect to increase cover for critical systems if you wish.

Examples of Priorities

Some examples our priority levels…

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)
Priority 5
Someone is missing the shortcut everyone has to a shared folder, though they can save files to it by manually navigating to the folder (there’s a straightforward workaround, and only one person is affected)

Our Process Packages

How we have helped manage company process’…

100+

Calls resolved everyday on the spot in 10 minutes

246

Supported clients throughout Kent and UK Nationwide.

680+

Monthly Support Requests on average through our helpdesk.

98%

Requests closed in less than 1 hour.

Get in touch

At IT Outcomes we love to hear from our customers, whether you are new to Managed IT Services, are looking to change your existing supplier or need advice just call or email and our approachable team.