SLA in Jira for beginners: Set up to win more customers

How to set up SLA for Jira if your company has never had it

You’ve delivered 80 tons of happiness to your customers, but they’ve expected 90 tons! Consumers always want more. Each of them will have a different expectation, and it can change every time they need your services. To ensure that the clients will be satisfied with what they get, you’ll need to agree on service levels. This article will explore benefits and settings of SLA for Jira users.

Who wins from the Service Level Agreement?

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and its clients. Putting it to practice can significantly help with closing expectation gaps and avoiding conflicts. Let’s try to find out what are the advantages for each party of SLA.

Benefits for service providers

Proving high quality. Customers will know the service supplier as reliable one. SLA shows an understanding of clients’ needs and readiness to solve problems.
Setting clear roles and responsibilities for every team member. With Jira SLA implementation, each of the company departments (sales, support, development, etc.) will better understand their mission on the way to meet clients’ expectations. SLA shows which specific metrics will be used to track team performance.
Identifying strengths and weaknesses. SLA obligates a vendor to monitor and check the levels of services that are provided. As a result it’ll be easier to find bottlenecks in the workflow and enhance the degree of customer satisfaction.
Aiming to improve even after targets are met. You can measure your SLA in Jira and look at past performance to find a way for growth.

Benefits for clients

Clarifying expectations. There’ll be no unexpected surprises for the customers. They’ll keep calm because SLA holds the service supplier accountable for delivering on their promises.
Establishing measurable standards. Service Level Agreement specifies the scope and you can set timers for SLA in Jira. Everyone will know what will be delivered, how and when issues will be resolved. It should also set the frequency and types of reports that will be provided.
Dealing with non-performance. Customers get a guarantee that the service supplier will fulfill commitments and meet the deadline; otherwise, penalties should be imposed.

So, SLA gives mutual understanding in terms of performance to provide a positive experience for all involved parties. A win-win situation! SLA monitor widget will help to measure your chances for success.

How are SLAs structured?

To understand SLA better, let’s break it into components. We need the one to describe the objectives (SLO) that matter in order to meet an agreement (SLA), and the one to define quantitative measures or indicators (SLI) for those objectives. Every part is crafted around customer experience.

Service Level Indicators (SLIs) are the metrics that indicate ?the success of transactions and allows to measure performance. SLI examples in Jira: availability of the services, time to the response, number of closed tickets.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are the goals a vendor needs to achieve and measure to drive a high level of service reliability. It helps to prioritize work at the internal level of the company. SLOs are the core of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) practice and need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely). SLO example in Jira: systems will be available 99.95% of the time.

Everything is connected here and allows you to provide the best for your users. If the team strives to achieve the SLO, the SLA is automatically met.

Getting started with SLA on example in Jira

It takes more than just defining services and how to manage them to create SLA. The biggest challenge is scheduling. In order to succeed here, you’ll need to operate with SLA Jira tools that contains the following features:

Countdown timers. SLA information should be easy to locate and comprehend. Operation managers and administrators can plan with the help of a timer that shows how much time is left till SLA is breached. They can take the required actions to prevent it.
Customizing. Administrators may wish to utilize SLA elements outside of contracts, or even add extra criteria to appointments. It’s critical to be able to customize notifications based on need.
Analyzing. Companies should know what works for them, what doesn’t, and how to improve in the future with accurate SLA monitoring.

Let’s overview starting the SLA with the help of the Atlassian SLA Time and Report app. As an example, we’ll take the support team and its ticketing process.

Your customer is facing an issue and reaching out for help. The support needs to be notified about it. Your goal is to resolve an incident within 24 hours.

Customize SLA timers to your Jira issues, specifying time measurement conditions. You can set a countdown to start when a user chooses a status “Waiting for support”. It will stop once the support manager has processed the request and chose the “Waiting for client” option.
Specify your time goals with multi-triggers. If your SLA says that critical tickets should be resolved within 24 hours and haven’t been solved in that timeframe, then an alert could be configured to notify the support manager or assign another person.
Monitor and analyze your SLAs with the help of report generation. You can observe which issues are met, exceeded, and in progress in a Graph view:

Takeaways

Setting SLA is crucial to meet customer expectations and organize internal work within the company. It’s a guide for your staff that can help them prioritize their efforts based on time and priority. It outlines what services you provide, what is required, and time limits.

To start with SLA, you need to define Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and most importantly, stick to it accurately. To get the most out of your SLA:

Consider the tools that will help with automation and calculation.
Try how you can customize everything according to your needs with SLA Time and Report plugin from the SaaSJet team.
Win more customers with SLA implementation!

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Who wins from the Service Level Agreement?

How are SLAs structured?

Getting started with SLA on example in Jira

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