What Is an SLA in Business?

Perhaps, you have already heard that companies that offer services require so-called service level agreements. These documents assist in managing client expectations and determine when users are not responsible for outages or gaps in the work of the provider. “Why is SLA important?” To understand this, it is crucial to define this abbreviation first.

Read more: what is an SLA?

SLA stands for the “service-level agreement.” It is an agreement between a party that offers some service(s) and users of those service(s). The contract covers the list of services and highlights the quality standards that the provider should follow to guarantee customer satisfaction. Clients can benefit from such documents as these agreements contain the qualities of the ordered service that makes it possible to compare with other organizations working in the same field. Such contracts also recall the ways to redress gaps and problems (e.g., using service credits).

What is an SLA model? To understand that, one may need to know the performance metrics which are usually evaluated. The model functions based on them (only some examples are listed):

• Availability & uptime percentage
• Various performance benchmarks
• Response time (often associated with the work of customer care service)
• Problem resolution time
• Usage statistics that will be provided