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ASP Forum
Individual SLAs for Major Accounts?
"Our sales reps routinely negotiate customized service-level
agreements with big customers, and the reps insist it 'doesn't
cost anything extra' for us to respond to a customer in two
hours instead of four or eight hours. But these different SLAs
are a nightmare to manage. Help!" Suggestions?
—Cindy from Cincinnati
Cindy—
First of all, it is a major mistake for sales reps to negotiate
any SLA for any customers. They have no skin in the game and
will not be there when it does not succeed. It is best if a
reliable representative of the support organization is involved
in any SLA agreements with any customer.
The best SLA's are based on a priority scheme created with
business impact and urgency (and sometimes geographic location).
Both of these criteria can be easily defined (providing written
documentation to the customer and published on your support web
pages) and agreed upon with the customer. Even the largest
customers do not need EVERY request responded to in 2 hours and
they will likely agree.
And, the sales reps are very wrong when they say or believe that
there is no additional costs to responding in 2 hours vs. 4 or 8
hours. There can be a large staffing cost to have enough
support reps at the ready to handle the 2 hour requests. Any
effort to document the additional resources that would be
required will be very helpful with your position. It is very
hard to argue with facts.
—Rick Kilton
303-823-6448
rkilton@rwkenterprises.com
www.rwkenterprises.com
This drove me nuts at first as well. My solution was to create
two tiers of support—standard, which is what most customers
receive, and premium, which is an SLA that is the best we can do.
Sales cannot provide responses above premium support.
Whenever an enterprise customer wants customized SLAs, I just put
them under the appropriate SLA. For example, our premium support
provides 1 hour response times. If a customer is insisting on 2
hours, we go ahead and sign the contract (with 2), but list them
as having premium (1 hr) support. We also charge customers for
the higher level of support, which makes it a win-win between
sales and support (sales can sell the higher support level which
they want, while support gets more revenue) :)
Hope this helps!
—Kevin Williams
Jive Software
kevin@jivesoftware.com
[If you have any other advice on this question, please send an
email to membership director Jane Farber at jfarber@asponline.com,
and we'll post your feedback.]
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