Achieving SLA Compliance: A Roadmap to Consistent Service Quality

IT solutions are either utilized as a service or procured from third-party vendors by organizations of all types and sizes.

This enables organizations to gain access to reliable IT technologies without having to internally build, operate, or manage the underlying systems.

As a result of this, both the organization and the solutions provider sign a service-level agreement (SLA), which commits the vendor to deliver services that meet the established performance requirements.

Organizations reprimand vendors if they fail to meet SLA requirements, as it negatively impacts the end-user experience and the overall business.

In this blog, we will explore SLA compliance as an ITSM and service desk metric to understand why measuring SLA compliance is essential and how it influences business outcomes.

What is a Service-Level Agreement (SLA)?

A  service-level agreement (SLA) is a written contract between a service provider and an organization that describes the level of service, including the metrics that will be used to measure, and in the event of a problem how long it will take to restore the service based on their category and priority.

If the vendor violates the agreed-upon service standards, the organization generally levies a penalty on the vendor and, if possible, revises the SLA with improved service commitments, implementing it immediately.

The vendor generally reviews the incident metrics and end-user complaints in-order to assess SLA compliance.

Even if SLA compliance does not explicitly contribute to the expected end-user experience, it enables the service desk team of the vendor to recognize elements for change.

From a business standpoint, measuring SLA compliance assists in determining whether the SLA commitments are realistic or not.

What is SLA compliance ratio?

SLA compliance determines the end-user experience by measuring the impact of an IT service.

So how do you actually measure it?

That’s where the SLA compliance ratio, better known as the SLA success rate, comes into play!

The SLA compliance ratio calculates the percentage of total service issues that meet the agreed-upon criteria and conditions, such as priority, cost, and time.

SLA compliance ratio =
No. of IT incidents resolved in line with SLA compliance / Total no. of IT incidents

Service desk teams must consider all specifications and conditions related to resolving service issues to calculate a precise SLA compliance ratio and accurately assess performance in accordance with the SLA agreement.

The SLA compliance ratio is one of the many metrics that service desk teams use to track their performance, but it comes with its own set of limitations.

To explore other key metrics measured by service desk teams, read our blog: 7 Important Service Desk Metrics to Measure.

Limitations of the SLA compliance ratio

As mentioned earlier there are a couple of challenges in creating a comprehensive SLA compliance ratio.

To significantly contribute to business goals, organizations must thoroughly align SLA metrics with the end-user experience and IT service performance.

Next, organizations should understand that there is no absolute concept of effective or successful incident response.

Resolving a high-priority incident with only a few minutes of SLA time remaining may not be as effective as resolving a low-priority incident with hours of SLA time available.

However, when calculating the SLA compliance ratio, both incident responses are treated as equally effective.

This shows that relying on the SLA compliance ratio may not always offer a comprehensive picture of how effectively the service provider resolves identified service issues.

As a result, the gap between IT incident resolution and end-user satisfaction may continue to exist.

So to get around these limitations, let’s look at some of the SLA best practices.

5 SLA Best Practices

Here are five best practices for developing and implementing service related SLAs to achieve service management success in the ITSM ecosystem.

1. Make sure that everyone comprehends the purpose of SLAs:

All stakeholders involved in establishing, negotiating, implementing, managing, and using SLAs must fully understand how they are defined, their purpose, and how their success is measured.

2. Establish realistic and achievable SLAs:

We should define SLAs in a way that they are realistic and achievable, but still able to push performance improvements.

The basic idea is that the service desk teams should believe in the concept because setting impossible SLA targets will make IT teams completely ignore them.

3. Review and update SLA targets regularly:

Organizations who fail to review and update their SLAs periodically are at risk of setting misplaced service level targets leading too non-compliance issues and as a result of SLA non-compliance, could end up with penalties and lose their end-users. ‘

If there are changes in a particular service, such as availability, uptime, service hours, closure, or response time, companies should review and update their SLAs immediately.

4. Map SLAs with end-user expectations:

Often, service providers meet the SLA metrics like service uptime but fail to support the end-user’s goals because they lack context.

So, service providers should aim to identify what end-customer wants and then define the SLA according to that goal.

This will not only affect how the service provider manages the end-users’ services but also enable them to understand the service levels better.

5. Develop individual SLAs for each service that needs to be measured:

Each service has its own processing and delivery time and authorization schedule.

Instead of developing a common SLA and specifying a single method to track all service requests, establish different SLAs for each service in your service catalog.

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