In today’s business environment where managed services are constantly being outsourced, creating a concise, official document outlining the terms of an agreement between the client and service provider is critical to setting the foundations for a trustworthy and ultimately fruitful relationship.
“Service-level agreements, amongst other things, bolster trust in and between organizations – making it clear what needs to be done, to what standard, and when.” – Adam Henshall, What is an SLA? How to Use Service-Level Agreements for Success
It’s simply an essential component that requires care and attention.
As you may well have already noticed and perhaps even put to good use, Process Street has been creating some excellent content for those of you looking to create first-class service level agreement’s in quick and easy fashion.
For a comprehensive introduction into what an SLA is, exactly what one consists of and why you need them, have a read through the following article:
If you are already familiar with the fundamentals of SLAs and are looking for guidance on how to create and edit one for your organization, you’ll find this post useful:
Bear in mind that the article referenced above also contains a free, easy-to-use Process Street template from which you can create as many service level agreements as you like.
And that’s what this post is all about – providing free, easy-to-use examples in the form of practical templates.
Below you can access 17 different service level agreement checklist templates.
The idea behind their construction was to broaden the scope of our general SLA creation template to include management review and metric tracking processes that follow months or even years after the agreement has been put in place.
For example, 3 months after the agreement was set, the client may request that the terms of the agreement be changed slightly, or the service provider needs to iterate their objectives.
Or you simply want to conduct periodic reviews of the agreement to ensure that all requirements are being met.
“Any service provider you choose should be more than happy to create an SLA with you. However, having an SLA isn’t enough. Always remember to review the contract as your business grows or changes. Your needs may change over time and your SLA should always reflect your organization’s evolving needs.” – CloudCarib, 3 Reasons Why You Need to Have an SLA with Your Service Provider
That’s what these templates enable you to do with ease.
Furthermore, each example addresses a different industry/use case. These include IT services, social media services, call center services, and HR services.
So, before we get into a quick intro for each template, let me clarify what you’ll be looking at.
3 of the templates are what we refer to as “master” templates. The first is the Service Level Agreement Template Process – the checklist presented in January in the second article I linked to earlier in the post.
The second master template is the SLA Management Checklist Template, which is simply an extension of the first master, which includes additional tasks following the SLA’s creation to review the agreement once a month. This master branches out into 7 other templates that are customized for various use cases.
The third and final master template is the SLA Metrics Tracking Process Template, which is designed to conduct periodic reviews of a service level agreement to ensure that all requirements are being met by both parties, and evaluate if any changes need to be made moving forward. Like the second master, this template also sets the foundation for 7 other templates addressing different use cases.
If you want to go straight to the checklists, there are quick links right below. Otherwise, scroll down for a brief intro to each one and to learn a little bit more about what makes Process Street’s checklists so powerful.
This is the general service level agreement creation process that we published back in January.
The template covers an SLA’s most important components, including:
Once you’ve completed the checklist, you will have a clean, concise SLA emailed to the customer.
This template is quite simply an extension of the general template linked above. The process does not end with the creation of the document but includes tasks for a 3-month review period.
The review process includes evaluating KPIs and other relevant metrics to ensure that performance is in compliance with the current SLA.
If it is not and adjustments need to be made, our conditional logic feature will kick in and present you with additional tasks to make the necessary iterations and inform the relevant personnel of the shortcoming and what needs to change moving forward.
Bear in mind that if you would like the review process to stretch further, let’s say for 1 year, then all you have to do is duplicate the review tasks for each month and make minor changes to reflect the time period.
Based off the template above, this checklist is customized for IT services – one of, if not the most common use case when it comes to service level agreements.
Considering how much SLAs differ from company to company, as well as the broad scope of “IT services”, the level of customization has deliberately been kept low.
“SLAs are inherently broad; there are no hard-and-fast rules regarding what should and what should not go into an SLA. It could be all on one page, or it could be a whopping 100+ page document.” – Thom James Carter, Service Level Agreement Template: How to Create Solid SLAs at Super Speed
Nevertheless, if you are an IT services provider looking to create flawless SLAs in quick and easy fashion, the layout and terminology in this checklist will be what you are looking for.
A cloud service level agreement is essential for outlining the minimum level of service that needs to be maintained regarding response times to system failures, general data security and other deliverables that have been clearly defined in the SLA.
In other words, the document is there to establish a mutual understanding of the services, prioritized tasks, responsibilities, guarantees and warranties provided by the cloud service provider.
This checklist will enable you to outline these services, ensuring that all requirements are both specific and measurable, in order that they can be effectively reviewed down the line.
If you are a social media services provider looking to help your customers engage with their target market and get the most out of our their social media accounts, an SLA will help you focus on the most important tasks by specifying what goals the customer wants to accomplish, and in what time span.
For example, the customer wants all tweets and Facebook messages to be responded to within 2 hours of receiving them. If you satisfy this requirement, then the customer is happy and you can easily prove that you are meeting the terms of the agreement.
This checklist will guide you through the SLA creation process and provide the tools to conduct monthly reviews of the SLA to make sure both the service provider and customer are satisfied with the way things are going.
This undoubtedly falls under “IT services”, but we felt it deserved its own template because it is a massive use case within the IT industry, and a big one for service level agreements.
“One of the driving contractual issues within a telecommunications (Telco) service provider environment is the underpinning contract that specifies the Service Level Agreements (SLA). These are important because often there are claw-backs which the client can use to penalize the Telco or alternatively use it as a gauge to decide whether to move services elsewhere.” – Ronald Bartels, Network Service Level Agreement (SLA) management within a Telco
This checklist will help you make sure that you are clarifying what services you will be providing, as well as those that you will not be providing, and should not be expected by the customer.
The purpose of a managed web hosting service level agreement is to ensure that the proper elements and commitments are in place to provide consistent support and maintenance for the client.
This is incredibly important because the level of support provided by the service provider can vary greatly.
“Especially in web hosting, the SLA includes all detailed information about the use and amount of the hosting resources. It also mentions the time period of service, response time and issue resolution time-frame. For example, if you call their support team about an issue and wait for a response. SLA will tell you how long this waiting period can be – ten seconds or ten minutes.” – Patricia Eldridge, The Importance of a Good Web Hosting Service Level Agreement (SLA) When Choosing a Hosting Service
As a web hosting service provider, run this checklist whenever you need to create a new SLA with a client. It will help you outline all services such as managed phone support, bug fixes, software and security updates, system backups, and whatever else is necessary.
Service level agreements for call centers are nothing short of essential because there are numerous quantitative metrics like response time, on-hold time, and first call resolution (FCR) that clearly demonstrate the quality of service being provided.
Run through this checklist to determine all of the KPIs and other metrics that will be referred to when evaluating performance and show whether or not you as the service provider are meeting expectations.
HR services vary greatly from the other use cases mentioned in this article in that the primary purpose of the services being provided is not related to IT.
Typically, HR services will include things like:
While the services being provided lean more towards qualitative than quantitative, there are still clear requirements and metrics that need to be laid out, and when done so properly lead to a number of benefits for the HR department and organization as a whole.
These benefits include an increase in HR productivity, efficient resource allocation, and perhaps most importantly, an uplift in employee experience.
“By providing HR with the means by which they can deliver faster response rates and greater case transparency to their employees along with the visibility they need to continually improve HR services, an SLA helps meet the expectations employees now have of their workplace technology.” – Kane Frisby, Top 5 Benefits of Service Level Agreements (SLA) in HR Service Delivery for 2020
To set the foundations for a well-oiled HR machine, use this checklist to create, share, and review SLAs with your customers or internally with your organization.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, the following 8 checklist templates are designed to conduct periodic reviews of service level agreements for the same use cases.
They assume that the SLA document has already been created and implemented, and are concerned with monitoring, reviewing, tracking metrics/KPIs, identifying and making any necessary iterations to ensure the relationship is maintained.
With this SLA metrics tracking process checklist, you will input relevant information in each task and conduct an effective review of performance.
This is the master checklist that is the foundation for the rest of the 7 templates that follow.
Components of the checklist include:
This checklist is suitable for both service providers customers. Our conditional logic feature will customize the checklist depending on which one you are.
A specific example of how conditional logic will work is if you are the service provider, then there will be additional tasks concerned with gathering customer feedback and identifying actionable insights to improve service delivery. Of course, if you are the customer, this would not be relevant.
A second example is if you have identified that changes need to be made to the SLA, additional tasks will appear guiding you through the process of communicating with the relevant personnel, confirming that the updates have been made, and gaining approval from senior management.
There is no getting around the fact that SLAs are difficult to track.
“To see how they’re performing against SLA, many IT managers have to extract a ton of raw data, write custom queries, and build elaborate Excel formulas and reports.” – Atlassian, How to set, measure and report on SLAs
Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean its impossible, and definitely should not be ignored if you are looking to maintain a long-term relationship with your customer or service provider.
There are also ways the process can be simplified, without having to “build elaborate Excel reports”.
The first and most important step is to set a baseline.
“Take an inventory of what you offer, and how it aligns to the business goals of your company and your customers.” – Atlassian, How to set, measure and report on SLAs
Then you can effectively evaluate whether or not current performance is meeting the requirements stated in the agreement, and determine if any changes need to be made.
That’s what this checklist enables you to do.
First, you gather all of the important performance data, conduct a thorough review, and make any necessary adjustments, ensuring that you are communicating clearly with the other party throughout the process.
As organizations are moving their systems, applications and data to the cloud, service level agreements have become increasingly important.
Without conducting frequent reviews, however, their relevance and impact on performance diminish greatly.
The cadence of reviews should be clearly outlined in the agreement. Without this conducting effective reviews will always be an uphill battle that will inevitably result in communication breakdowns and jeopardize the relationship.
“Most SLAs are negotiated to meet the needs of the customer at the time of signing, but many businesses change dramatically in size over time. A solid cloud service-level agreement outlines intervals for reviewing a contract so that it meets the changing needs of an organization.” – Bridget Botelho – Don’t get hoodwinked by cloud SLA promises
Assuming that the timing and method of review processes is agreed upon between the customer and service provider, this checklist will enable you to conduct the review in an efficient manner.
Evaluating SLA metrics for social media performance is relatively simple because almost all data is quantitative and has a very narrow scope (social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook).
For example, one of the most basic and important methods of assessing a company’s social media customer service is the customer satisfaction score; a rating from typically 1-5 that the customer gives after an issue is resolved via a social media platform.
These scores need to be collected and can then be entered into this checklist so they can be compared against the requirements that were laid out in the SLA.
Other performance data like average response times and net promoter scores (NPS) should be gathered in the checklist so they can be evaluated.
These metrics depend on exactly what kind of network services are being provided.
“There are a large number of metrics that exist within Information Technology (IT). In a Telco the important are mostly Mean Time to Respond, Mean Time to Repair and Availability. The norm in a Tier 1 Telco is 20 minutes to respond, 4 hours to repair and 99% availability.” – Ronald Bartels, Network Service Level Agreement (SLA) management within a Telco
One of the essential metrics to determine for network services is the time when a client should be contacted when a link outage has been detected. The metric that follows is the time before when the outage should be resolved.
Whether you are the network service provider or the customer, run this checklist periodically, ideally once a month, to ensure that your requirements are being met and that the SLA is still in line with your business objectives.
The KPIs and metrics for managed web hosting are very similar to those that apply to network services that I briefly went through for the previous template.
As the service provider, you want to make sure that you are receiving payment for all support costs at the agreed intervals. You also want to verify that a client representative is available when resolving a service-related incident or request.
As the customer on the other hand, you want to make sure that phone and email support are being provided as was agreed upon in the service level agreement. Other services like regular backups of your website, bug fixes, and security testing need to be evaluated to ensure SLA compliance.
Whichever side of the relationship you are on, enter the relevant information in this checklist and move forward knowing that you and the other party are on the same page.
There are numerous metrics that apply to call center services, and frequently reviewing them is a must-do to continuously improve service delivery.
“In the customer service industry, businesses must track and improve the essential call center metrics to understand where the business is heading to and what action plan is required to achieve better results.” – Jasmina Aneja, 15 Essential Call Center Metrics Your Business Must Measure
A few examples of important call center metrics include:
The level of expected performance regarding such metrics will be outlined in your service level agreement. For review, gather the most up-to-date data, enter them into the checklist and proceed to compare them with what was agreed upon in the SLA.
The difficulty with measuring the performance of HR services is you often have to translate qualitative data into quantitative data. This of course can never be 100% accurate, but is simply the nature of dealing with us complex humans.
Nevertheless, there are a number of key data points that can be used to evaluate performance, namely the SLA achievement rate, which is the percentage of requests and transactions that the HR service provider resolved within the agreed-upon time frame.
This checklist will guide you through the process of collecting information that can be reviewed against the SLA to verify that the service provider is meeting expectations.
If they are not, then the checklist will present you with the steps needed to update the terms of the agreement, or at worst, terminate it.
With our fantastic new feature Approvals, you can streamline the completion of any tasks that need authorization by another person.
A number of approval tasks have been built into the templates above. A couple of examples are:
Creating your own approval tasks is super simple. Here is a quick overview of how to do so.
To add an approval task, click on the approvals button on the bottom left-hand bar within the template editor, where tasks and task headers are usually added.
Once the approval task has been put in, you can then select which tasks are subject to approval.
After the tasks that are subject to approval have been completed, the assigned decision-maker can then open the checklist, see the information from the tasks, then either approve, reject, or reject with a comment.
With approvals, it’s not just a case of flat-out acceptance or rejection; comments can be sent to the submitter to provide the feedback necessary for the task’s completion.
What’s even quicker than approving or rejecting items from a browser on your laptop is doing it via your phone’s email app.
This enables you to make important decisions while on the go, no matter if you’re walking to an important meeting, or in a cab on your way to catch a flight.
Here are four of the biggest benefits our approval feature can bring to your organization:
With all the above benefits in mind, why not upgrade today and harness the power of a simplified approval flow yourself?
Process Street is superpowered checklists.
You can document workflows, business processes, and integral procedures as templates. Then, whenever you want to follow that process, you run a checklist from that template.
For recurring tasks, checklists help with business efficiency by streamlining the process. Plus, you can keep human error at bay!
Check out our intro video for more on how Process Street works.
But what makes Process Street checklists superpowered, exactly?
Our checklist app contains incredible additional features, such as stop tasks, conditional logic, dynamic due dates, task permissions, task assignments, role assignments, and approvals. When added to your templates, these features bolster run-of-the-mill checklists into intelligent checklists that simply cannot be matched by anything else on the market.
How do you go about reviewing your service level agreements? Do you have any suggestions for SLA-related checklists that could help you optimize your business relationships? Let us know by writing a comment, your insights are important to us.
