Achieving excellent SLA compliance

Achieving excellent SLA compliance in a managed service is always important but compliance stats don’t tell the whole story.

For example, what are the SLAs actually for and how close to breaching was the managed service provider? I’ve just come out of a monthly service review meeting with one of our larger managed services customers and we were able to report 100% SLA compliance for the 74 incidents raised last month. But two underlying factors make that really impressive.

First, Claremont is highly unusual in providing SLAs for incident resolution times and not just the usual response times. Meeting incident response guarantees is difficult, and realistically, the nature of Oracle support means we can’t always hit 100% compliance, but that’s not a reason not to offer resolution SLAs. So it’s really satisfying to achieve 100% compliance over a large number of incidents.

The second measurement to check with SLA compliance is how much of the allowed time was consumed before the SLA was closed. Compliance is less impressive, and less useful to the customer, if incident responses and resolutions are completed just before the SLA would be breached. That is always a clear sign that the managed services provider is just working to the SLAs rather than delivering the best possible service. Claremont’s 100% compliance was achieved while consuming just 12% of the time permitted by the SLAs.

Naturally the customer is very happy and this is a great demonstration of the quality of support delivered by Claremont’s managed services team.