Agreements
A service agreement is an agreement between two persons or businesses where one agrees to provide a specified service to the other.
It can also be an express undertaking of employment signed by both the employer and the employee detailing therein the explicit terms and conditions of service.
In Service Level Management (SLM) there are (normaly) four levels of agreements:
Experience Level Agreements (XLA), Service Level Agreements (SLA), Operational Level Agreements (OLA) and Underpinning Contracts (UC)
Experience Level Agreements
Put customer experience (CX) at the center of service performance, ensuring that all service interactions and touchpoints are considered when defining whether the service meets the agreed performance level.
Customer experience is the sum of all functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a service consumer.
XLAs measure business outcomes from the customer perspective. Like SLAs, XLAs look at whether services were available or performed to a certain degree.
XLAs go beyond this, also tracking whether that availability and performance supported the customer to achieve what they wanted.
Service Level Agreements
A Service Level Agreements (SLA) is an important document that is used to define the level of a service that exists between a service provider and their customer.
A Service Level Agreements (SLA) is an external agreements between a service provider and a customer.
A Service Level Agreement can either be an informal contract between parties or a legally binding contract.
The agreement can consist of one or more service targets.
Service targets can define penalties for noncompliance of an agreement or rewards for meeting and exceeding the specified goals.
The agreement is generally in expressed in a simple language so that it can be clearly understood by the customer. The document may also include more technical terms for defining the service. The Service Level Agreement is often part of a wider service contract.
The SLA may address several areas including the availability of the service, the performance of the service, how it will operate, priorities, responsibilities of involved parties, guarantees and warranties.
As well as defining key areas, the Service Level Agreement may also specify a level of service, including targets and a minimum level that can be reached.
Some of the common uses for a Service Level Agreement would be for telecom companies, IT service providers, Internet Service Providers (ISP) and outsourcing.
Types of Service Level Agreement
As a Service Level Agreement can be used in many areas, there are several types of SLA that can be used, including:
- Customer SLA: This is where there is an agreement with an individual customer
- Service SLA: This service agreement is for every customer making use of the services being provided
- Multi-level SLA: This is a combination of levels with the purpose of addressing multiple sets of customers
- Corporate SLA: This covers all Service Level Management (SLM) issues
- Customer Level SLA: Covers all SLM issues that apply to a particular group of customers
- Service Level SLA: This covers all SLM issues that apply to specific services
Operational Level Agreements
An Operational Level Agreements (OLA) is an internal agreements that a service provider defines for internal users to meet SLAs.
OLAs can also contain one or more objectives or service targets.
The OLAs would be used to track internal service commitments such as the following service targets:
- Response time for incidents or problems assigned to IT groups
- Availability of servers supporting various applications
Underpinning Contracts
Agreements that are used to track performance between an external service provider and a vendor.
The below graphic shows how the three commitments work together:
