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. An SLA met on average but missed 20% of the time still damages trust. Build in headroom.
Track actual performance against SLA weekly. 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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