SLA — Service level agreement
A service level agreement is the written commitment to respond within set deadlines. It fixes maximum times — usually first response and resolution — defines the hours in which they count, and normally states what happens when they are missed.
What is service level agreement?
A service level agreement is the written commitment to respond within set deadlines. It fixes maximum times — usually first response and resolution — defines the hours in which they count, and normally states what happens when they are missed.
Also: SLA · service level
Internal target versus contractual commitment
Plenty of companies call an internal goal an SLA: "we want to reply within two hours". A real SLA sits in a contract, has consequences when breached — usually a credit — and therefore forces you to measure in a specific, auditable way. Confusing the two is how sales promises something support cannot sustain.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is what turns support into a measurable obligation. For a SaaS selling to large companies, the SLA comes up in negotiation before the price, and it defines how many people you need: committing to a one-hour response outside office hours means having somebody on call.
Service level agreement in detail
What gets committed
Nearly always first response time, sometimes resolution time and, in large contracts, service availability. Committing to resolution is risky: it does not depend on you alone, because a case may need information from the customer.
The hours are half the agreement
A four-hour commitment means very different things in business hours versus clock time. It has to be written down, with the time zone and the holidays that apply, or the first argument arrives on the first holiday.
Tiers by plan
The usual approach is a ladder: the entry plan with no commitment, the middle one with a response within one business day, the top one measured in hours. It is a legitimate way to monetise support, as long as what you offer without a commitment stays acceptable.
How to meet it without growing the team
By resolving without a person whatever does not need one, so human capacity is free for exactly what carries a commitment. An agent that closes routine questions in seconds breaches no SLA: it leaves it comfortable.
How Intake handles it
Questions about service level agreement
What does SLA stand for?
Service Level Agreement. It is the written commitment to respond within set deadlines, usually with contractual consequences when they are missed.
Does an SLA commit to resolution or only to a response?
The usual practice is committing to first response, because it depends on you alone. Committing to resolution is riskier: the deadline may depend on information only the customer can supply.
Does a small SaaS need an SLA?
Only when a customer asks for one, which usually coincides with the first large contract. Before that, a public commitment about your support hours does the same job without the contractual obligation.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
FRT — First response time
First response time is how long passes between a customer sending their question and receiving the first reply from a person. It measures the initial wait, not the resolution, and it is the metric that weighs most heavily on whether support feels good or not.
Resolution time
Resolution time is how long passes between a question arriving and it being resolved and closed. Unlike first response time, it measures the whole process, including waits on the customer and escalations to other teams.
Escalation
Escalation is handing a conversation to somebody with more knowledge or more permissions to resolve it. It can go from one support tier to another, from an automated agent to a person, or from support to engineering — and in every case whoever receives it has not seen the case until that moment.
Service desk
A service desk is the single point of contact between an organisation and the people who use its technology services. Beyond resolving incidents, it handles service requests, changes and access, and works through formal processes: a service catalogue, service level agreements and approval flows.
Support tiers
Support tiers are the usual way of splitting questions by what it takes to resolve them. Tier 1 handles the known and documented, tier 2 what requires technical knowledge of the product, and tier 3 what ends up with whoever wrote the code.
Knowledge base
A knowledge base is the organised set of articles documenting how a product works and how to resolve what gets asked often. It serves two audiences at once: customers looking up the answer themselves, and the team using it as the source for their replies.
