Does Your Organization Use an SLA for Internal Support?
An SLA, or Service Level Agreement is a negotiated contract between the service provider and the customer. For example, if you were outsourcing your technical support for all your printers you would want to know what printers were supported, who to call and when, what the response and resolution times are and what happens when it takes too long to get something fixed. Are there financial penalties for exceeding the resolution time specified in the contract? If the printer can’t be fixed after 1 day will it just get replaced? These kinds of agreements are essential and common when you are outsourcing your support.
But what about in-house internal support like an IT Help Desk? Supposedly having an SLA for your in-house support organization is a best practice but in reality, it seems to be a rare beast. More often what I see is an organically grown “understanding” around levels of support. Somewhere, on the corporate intranet, site is a list of hardware and software supported. When employees (internal customers) need help fixing an application that they they need to do their job, they don’t go looking at SLAs and probably don’t go check the list of supported items that the IT department posted. And, why should they?
What am I getting at here? With respect to internal support organizations, an SLA is no substitute for properly trained support analysts and a culture of customer service. In fact, I have seen cases where the IT department used the SLA to defend their “excellent” performance in spite of the fact that employee (internal customers) surveys indicated otherwise. Bottom line: The SLA can be a useful tool in the right hands but it is no substitute for customer satisfaction. If your department is using an SLA to defend poor service you would all be better off throwing the damn thing out.
