Customer vs team-focused SLA calculations for Managed Service Providers

Being able to adequately understand how we are operating from a customer's perspective is critical for our business. When we attack a complex problem, it’s not good enough for just some of our teams involved to meet their SLAs — collectively, we must meet the high bar our customers hold for us.

That was Delaware International CIO Xavier Van Moen discussing the new flexibility added to the SLA capabilities within Xurrent.

Measuring response and resolution times is the backbone of a strong IT organization.

Since its inception over 15 years ago, SLAs have been at the core of Xurrent’s business philosophy. We’ve always invested in a robust, consistent, and reliable set of SLA calculations. These measurements are generally correlated with both customer satisfaction and IT maturity.

SLA analysis can yield valuable insights into everything from training needs to automation opportunities. Additionally, SLAs often serve as a powerful tool to manage third-party service providers. From a Managed Service Provider (MSP) perspective, which is also a significant part of the Xurrent customer base, SLAs often define their entire success.

‍Through the course of a single incident, Xurrent can calculate a multitude of parallel yet independent SLA calculations for all parties involved in resolving a ticket. Xurrent anchors on two key measurements: 

1. Response Targets
2. Resolution Targets

Each can be tied to specific service contracts with third parties, customers, and internal users. 

A simple example: Providing desktop support for Senior leaders may have a 10-minute response time vs. 1 hour for more junior employees.  

As Xurrent grows, the need for even more dynamic SLA calculations is even more imperative. Specifically, MSPs have pushed Xurrent to think about SLA calculations beyond the walls of a single organization. When you cross the boundaries between two companies, SLAs can often take on new meaning. SLA adherence can drive everything from billing to the overall health of the relationship between the MSP and its customers.

Customers have spoken. Xurrent has listened. We’re excited to announce yet another evolution of our SLA capabilities: Customer vs. Team-focused SLAs.

Customer vs. Team-focused SLAs (an example)

To understand this more completely, let’s walk through an example using an example from Delaware International’s SAP Practice.

A customer raises a support ticket because discounts aren’t being applied correctly on sales orders in their SAP S/4HANA system.

The agreed-upon resolution goal for pricing changes is 6 hours, as these are relatively common issues to be remediated by a Tier 1 team. After 5 hours of review, it becomes clear that the root cause isn’t the pricing logic itself, but a data integration with a CRM system. The ticket immediately gets escalated to the Integration team, and the requestor is notified of the findings.

But here is the rub:  Integration problems are generally more complex and may even require a code deployment. Thus, they have a longer resolution SLA (say, 24 hours). 

So …

Does the Integration team get 19 hours to resolve the problem (24 SLA, less the 5 hours the Tier 1 team had it)?

OR 

Are they allowed the full 24 hours because they’re just now finding out?

‍Hint: There is no wrong answer. Both have merits.

Historically, Xurrent erred on the side of the individual team and would say, “The Integration team gets 24 hours.” Very cut and dried. And arguably fair to the Integration team, who, for the past 5 hours, were not aware the incident even existed!

However, in the context of an MSP who is serving a paying customer, this logic quickly unravels.

From the customer's perspective, the clock started ticking when they submitted the ticket. And let’s be honest, the customer doesn’t know — or care for that matter — that you spun your wheels for 5 hours figuring out it wasn’t a pricing problem. From a customer viewpoint, the clock never stopped. They fully expect the issue to be resolved in 19 hours (24 less the 5 already spent).

Complex SLA calculations are what Xurrent does best, and now we’re empowering customers to choose their preference through a simple setting:

We’ve been testing this with a handful of enterprise accounts over the past month, including Delaware International. Be on the lookout for the “toggle option” in your environment soon!

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