An SLA is a commitment with consequences attached. Most small businesses copy numbers from a competitor and discover later that nobody measures them and nobody could have met them anyway.
A service level agreement states what level of service a customer will receive, how it is measured, and what happens when it is not delivered. It is a contractual commitment rather than a marketing statement, and the difference matters: a target you publish becomes a promise somebody can hold you to.
The common failure is copying figures. A competitor promises a four-hour response, so you promise a four-hour response, without measuring what you currently do or arranging cover for the hours you are asleep. The first time somebody invokes it, you discover that the number was never grounded in anything.
Measure before you promise. Take your last fifty tickets or jobs, calculate what you actually achieved, and set the commitment somewhere you meet comfortably rather than at your best-case figure. An SLA met ninety-eight per cent of the time builds trust; the same number missed monthly destroys more goodwill than a slower promise ever would.
Three commitments of very different difficulty. Response time — a human replying — is largely within your control and safe to promise. Resolution time depends on what broke, and committing to it means committing to problems you have not seen yet; a target rather than a guarantee is the honest form. Uptime is a percentage that sounds mild and is not: ninety-nine per cent allows over seven hours of downtime a month, while ninety-nine point nine allows around forty-three minutes. Know which one you are promising, because the operational cost between them is enormous.
An SLA sits between you and a customer. An operational level agreement sits between internal teams and supports it — if you promise a customer four hours and your supplier's part of the chain takes a day, the external promise cannot hold. Underpinning contracts with third parties are the same idea one level further out. For a small business the useful version of this is simply checking that the promise you make outward is supported by the arrangements you have inward, which is where suppliers come in via vendor management and third party risk management.
Ettex Records holds the agreement, the priority definitions and the measurement record with review dates attached, so the commitment and the evidence sit together. The support side that has to deliver it is covered in help desk and support ticket, and satisfaction alongside it in customer satisfaction score.
Being direct: there is no SLA timer, no automatic breach alerting and no service credit calculation. Those are features of dedicated help desk products. What we hold is the document, the definitions and the record — and the honest observation that most small-business SLAs fail on definition rather than on tooling.
Scope and exclusions, defined metrics, the hours the clock runs, priority definitions, how measurement happens, consequences of breach, and a review cadence.
One you already meet. Measure your last fifty requests and commit somewhere comfortably inside that, not at your best case.
Response is a human replying — largely within your control. Resolution depends on what broke, so it is better stated as a target than guaranteed.
Over seven hours of downtime a month. 99.9% allows around forty-three minutes. The operational cost between those two is very large.
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