A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and a client/user that specifies, usually in measurable terms, the expected level of support the service provider will furnish. Support organizations have adopted the idea of writing a Service Level Agreement so that services for their users can be measured, justified, and used as a resource to compare against other providers.

Metrics that are available:

• SLA time for initial response to open tickets.
• SLA time for closure of ticket.
• Percentage of tickets closed on time.
• Percentage of tickets with on time initial response.
• Priority overrides for specific type of problems.

With the new SLA feature organizations will be able to define multiple priority levels and assign an expected SLA completion time and an expected SLA response time. Priority levels will be ranked in an escalating fashion with a level 1 being the highest priority. All priorities are customizable and include an area to add a detailed description to better define the priority.

Priority Configuration - (screen shot) - bigWebDesk allows administrators to setup and define as many priorities as needed for your organization. Each priority has its own SLA settings.

SLA’s can also be modified to match any organizations work environment or operating hours. Each priority level is editable to recognize holidays, business hours, and weekends. By setting these metrics you will ensure accurate projections on completion time and responses are given to the technician and user.

Organizations are also able to set SLA goals. Establishing a SLA goal is helpful during reporting and evaluating technicians’ success rates. For a specific ticket priority organizations will define a percentage goal for completion and response times that they expect to meet. For example, if you set the SLA Completion Percentage to 75% and the SLA Offset to 10 days, you expect to complete 75% of this priority tickets within 10 days of the ticket creation. In the event that you evaluate your performance and it indicates that your target goals are off, your organization will be able to update its SLA documents accordingly.

Priority/SLA detail configuration.

Ticket detail showing SLA predictions.

Zoom of ticket detail screen.

Email from bigWebDesk showing expected SLA response and completion dates.

After the ticket has been created the technician will be able to see when the ticket is expected to be completed and when the user is expecting a response. The user will also receive an instant notification via email with the projected service and response times.

Once the technician has successfully closed out the ticket the SLA Response time and Completion time will be stored. In the event that a particular ticket is reopened the settings will be restarted and recalculated to include the additional time.

Closed ticket showing SLA response and completion time used for this ticket.

The SLA feature is a new addition to bigWebDesk that will allow technicians to be more proactive in their support (i.e. determine when service requests are due) versus reactive. We are making many changes and upgrades to better improve bigWebDesk service to our clients and technicians.

If you have any questions or comments about this feature please post them on the bigWebDesk Message Board.