Ticket Service Level Agreements

What is an SLA?

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and its internal or external customers that documents what services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet. NPG uses SLAs to define first reply time, and resolution time, of end user created tickets. 

The priority levels and their corresponding time frames are as follows: 

Note: Task, and question type tickets do NOT have a resolution SLA, but still carry a first reply SLA.

*Urgent SLA time is counted in calendar hours, while normal priority is counted in business hours.

Urgent

Think of an Urgent Ticket as something that it is going to stop production, broadcast, affect revenue or have negative customer impact. Once an Urgent ticket has been created, the assigned IT group will be paged.  In the event that an Urgent ticket is opened and the assigned group has not responded to the issue within 20 minutes, IT management will be paged.

Examples of urgent priority tickets:

• Internet, phone, or email outages affecting more than one user.
• Power Outage.
• Malfunctioning press equipment.
• Newsflow failures affecting multiple users or workflows.

Normal

Normal priority is where most of your tickets will be created. A normal ticket is generally something that is only affecting you, but is not preventing you from completing your work. This priority is also where most, but not all, of the service requests will end up.

Examples of normal priority tickets:

• You are unable to print to a certain printer.
• Your outlook is locked up.
• Your computer is running slower than usual.
• You cannot access voicemail.

Examples of a service request:

• Installing new computer hardware, such as a second monitor or RAM upgrade.
• Moving computer hardware/equipment from one location to another.
  
  

High and Low Priority

The high and low priority options share the same SLA times as normal priority.  End users do not have the ability to select the priority of a ticket directly, aside from opening an urgent ticket through a separate link in the Help Center. 

By doing away with priority, we are able to streamline end user ticket creation to its simplest form. High and low can still be set manually by an agent in order to help organize their assigned tickets. 

Task and Question Tickets.

When a ticket comes in that is a simple task, or a question, there is no resolution SLA. These kinds of tickets are always behind actual incidents or problems. 

Examples of tasks and question tickets:

• Non vital software updates. 
• Asking how to perform a certain task in Outlook, or webmail.
• Requesting changes to phone queues.