Monitoring Customer Support Performance with SLA Implementation

If you are a customer support manager, chances are that you have an SLA system setup. However, an effective SLA implementation is where most of the customer support executives get stuck. Now, why do we say an effective SLA? That’s because, with an effective SLA, you can get:

• Improved customer service
• Facilitated communication
• Enhanced customer expectation management
• Efficiently managed customer expectations

Why is SLA so crucial?

Organizations with SLA implemented have higher customer and employee satisfaction ratings, greater productivity, and reduced costs. Additionally, with SLA customers can:

• Choose the service level they want
• Measure satisfaction levels of customers under different buckets
• Determine the maturity level of your Service Desk/Help Desk
• Generate additional revenue stream from dedicated support packages

How can this be Implemented?

Every support request is an opportunity to connect with your customers and enhance your relationship with them. SLA implementation enables you to segregate support requests so that each customer inquiry automatically goes to the right customer support engineer and has the quickest and accurate solution. Implementation of SLA can be done in three simple ways-

• Understand Your Customers’ Expectations
  Identify your customers’ needs which includes getting familiar with their daily operations, process and business initiatives. This helps you in placing your customers in different buckets or service levels. For e.g., you can segregate your elite, premium and named customers, and assign them to different support engineers. This will save the customers from the hassle of calling different support engineers every time.
• Develop Service Levels and Map It to Customer Satisfaction
  Define SLA service levels so that your customer support engineers can monitor customers’ service level performance and meet the service level goals. You can create service levels based on ticket priority, such as urgent, high, medium or low. For e.g. you can specify that high priority tickets should be assigned to an agent within 30 minutes and solved within 4 hours.

• Track Case Ageing to See Monitor Case Response and Resolution Time
  Measure the average response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customers. It ensures that you’re delivering measurable and expectable service. It also provides enhanced visibility when issues arise.

Key Points to Remember When Implementing SLA

• If you do not strategize who you support, then you support all type of customers.
• If you do not strategize what you support, then you support all type of queries.
• If you do not strategize when you support then, you support around the clock.

The SLA clock doesn’t start when the customer lodges a ticket; it actually starts when your service goes down! SLA is a great tool for better communication with your customers’, improved customer expectation management and enhanced service efficiency.

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