Finding out at the monthly review
Your contracts promise a response within set hours and a fix within set days, with different terms for different customers and priorities. The support team works hard, but at the monthly service review the customer produces their own list of tickets where you missed the target. You cannot argue, because you did not know either.
Some breaches were avoidable: a ticket sat unassigned over a weekend, or waited for a reply from another team. Nobody noticed until it was already late.
Why breaches creep up unseen
SLA terms are usually written in contracts and remembered roughly by the team. The helpdesk may have a single default target, or none, rather than the specific terms each customer signed up to.
Even where targets exist, the clock is complicated. It should often run only in business hours, pause while you are waiting for the customer, and differ by priority. If the helpdesk is not set up to calculate that properly, the numbers people see are misleading, so they stop looking.
And tickets at risk are not visible in the normal queue. An agent looking at their list sees subjects and ages, not 'this one breaches in two hours'.
What late-noticed breaches cost
| Effect | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Service credits or penalties | Direct cost written into the contract |
| Awkward service reviews | The customer knows your performance better than you do |
| Renewals at risk | Breaches are remembered at contract time |
| Firefighting | Late tickets rushed, quality suffers |
| No reliable figures | You cannot show good performance either |
The last point cuts both ways. Without trustworthy SLA figures, you also cannot show a customer how well you have done, which is a useful thing to have at renewal.
How SpiderHunts puts the SLA clock where your team can see it
- Collect the SLA terms from each customer's contract: response and resolution targets by priority, business hours, holidays, and what pauses the clock.
- Set them up in your helpdesk (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Jira Service Management, HubSpot, ServiceNow) as proper SLA policies, linked to each customer's organisation. Where the helpdesk cannot express the terms, we calculate deadlines in a small service alongside it.
- Make sure priority is set correctly at the start, with rules and, where useful, AI classification of urgency from the ticket text, checked by a person when uncertain.
- Show the time remaining on every ticket in the agent's view, and sort queues by nearest deadline rather than age.
- Warn the owner as a deadline approaches, and alert the team lead if the ticket is unassigned or still at risk closer to the deadline, by Teams, Slack or email.
- Flag tickets waiting on another internal team, so internal delays are visible rather than hidden inside support's numbers.
- Report compliance per customer and per priority, with every breach listed and its reason, so service reviews use your figures.
Getting the clock right is the fiddly part: business hours across time zones, bank holidays, and pausing correctly while waiting for the customer. We test it against past tickets before relying on it.
No more surprises at the service review
Agents can see which tickets are closest to breaching and work on them first. Team leads hear about risk while there is still time to act. Breaches still happen occasionally, but they are rare, known about in advance, and explained.
Planning improves too. With accurate figures by customer, priority and time of day, you can see when the team is stretched and whether breaches cluster around weekends, holidays or particular types of ticket, which tells you where cover or process changes would help.
At the monthly review, you bring the figures, with reasons for any breaches and what was done about them. That is a very different conversation from being shown your own failures by the customer.
Are you finding out about breaches too late?
- Customers tell you about SLA breaches before you know about them.
- Your helpdesk does not hold each customer's specific SLA terms.
- Tickets are worked in age order rather than by deadline.
- Unassigned tickets can sit over weekends or holidays unnoticed.
- You do not trust your own SLA figures.