24th May 2012

You are here: Home / Blog / Operation / How Help Desk SLA’s lie – “Four Hour Response” my butt.

How Help Desk SLA’s Lie – “Four Hour Response” My Butt.

14th February 2009 By 10 Comments

Three hours later the Level 1 person contacted me, agreed that they could not solve this and would escalate the issue.

Three and a half hours later, the Level 2 person contacted me and spent three hours working on the problem and agreed that they could not solve this and would escalate the issue.

Two hours later the Level 3 engineer contacted me and we spend 15 minutes to fix the problem.

Total fix time: NOT FOUR HOURS.

Now its 2200 and I am really tired of waiting, the problem is fixed and the blamestorming has begun as to why the SLA was not met. The look on the management’s face when they realise that they signed the contract knowing full well that this was the deal. “Four Hour Response” means exactly what the Help Desk company wants it say.

Chew on that suckers. Even after I told you the problem when you negotiated the contract, and pointed out that the service level would not be any better than doing the work internally. But no, you had to outsource that work because you thought it would save money, and now my knowledge base is shrinking because I don’t have enough people in my team to share knowledge with. I don’t have anyone to discuss the problem with and dynamically solve the problems.

And when I walk out the door, you will all pat yourselves on the back and say “we have the helpdesk, nothing to worry about”, and then realise that the Help Desk needs an intelligent question to get an intelligent answer.

So long suckers.

Four hour SLA ? Yeah right.

That’s how outsourcing sucks.

PS

And yes, I spent the time between help desk calls not doing anything, after all, it’s the help desk that does all the work. Right ?

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved
Filed Under: Operation, Opinion Tagged With: ,
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • http://blog.ioshints.info Ivan Pepelnjak

    That’s why all our assistance contracts specify 4-hour Time to Repair :) .

  • http://ertw.com/blog/ Sean

    Even a 4 hour time to repair SLA doesn’t mean your problem will get solved in 4 hours. It means it’ll get solved in 4 hours or the provider is assessed a monetary penalty. One would hope that aligns the interests of both parties…

    We have a 4 hour repair SLA on our primary WAN circuits. Many outages are not solved in the 4 hours, so we end up getting the circuit for free. However the cost of the circuit is usually nothing compared to what we lose when we circuit goes down.

    In that sense the penalty should be appropriate to the cost of the outage, but no provider is going to sign that.

    Even if you could agree on all that, you still have to agree on how to measure it. I once had some monitored services where we had to notice the problem to claim the credit. What a joke.

    The people negotiating the contracts are rarely the people that have to live with them.

    Sean

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      You need to think about this. There are ways in even the biggest companies to push the problem onto the decision maker. For example, get the blamethrower out and point it at the person.

      Means some paperwork, but revenge is a dish best served cold.

  • Roland

    “The people negotiating the contracts are rarely the people that have to live with them.”

    100% agree!

    I work as network engineer, I very rarely can read the contracts before they get signed but once it’s signed, me and my team have to respect it. There’s something wrong in that but none of the managers seems to notice it. So I work 12 hours/day and my salary never raises, while sales get prizes and benefits for te good job. I think I would better move to pre-sales asap.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      Everyone should do at least a year in pre-sales. The most important thing that I learned was how to sell “myself”. This has been very valuable when asking for a pay rise or negotiating employment contracts.

      I didn’t like selling much, but I don’t regret the time spent.

  • Steve B

    I guess I’m on both sides of the fence here as I work in Ops for an Outsourcer, sorry IT Services company, but also deal with other companies providing us a service for our customers. Managed WAN connections being the main one.

    My biggest gripe is that issues are not passed up the technical chain quickly enough. I don’t denigrate the work of 1st line but their primary role should be to pass work to the correct people as quickly as possible. Instead it seems they have been given very basic diagnostic skills and told to carry out fixes themselves as much as possible. Doesn’t work in my experience.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      Now thats a circular problem. You see, management will make the connection that reducing the number of calls escalated means better use of cheaper staff, and therefore create an environment that stops or prevents escalation unless absolutely necessary.

      Customer service is, typically, a secondary consideration.

      Oh, and the numbers that management use to analyse this situation always support this conclusion. I have never understood how this happens.

  • Zack

    There is a growing presumtion in this thread that the outsourcer wants to do the best for the client. Initially that is true but as soon as some excell minded, harda$$ senior manager jumps in, that all goes out the window as soon as they start looking at “PRODUCTIVITY” of the analysts working the calls.

    You get measured and possibly sacked by this. Pretty soon, your desire to really help solve the ticket so that it shouldn’t occur again is completely outweighed by your need to meet your productivity target set by your boss.

    This is where you learn tricks that can keep the food on your table like thinking of an obscure question to ask the client to aid diagnosis …. when the outsourcer employs cheap 24/7 staff who know, over the wekend or throughout the evening, the client is not going to be there to answer their given phone number until next morning 9am or Monday morning which leaves the call ticking away on THEIR side of the stack whilst the analyst continues to try and fix the problem. That one works a treat everytime !

    When, in conversation, you learn a key member of customer staff is on leave for a week, point the next step in fixing the call in their direction and, make the clock tick on the customer’s side yet again.

    Ask for FULL experiences of the problem from ALL staff experiencing the problem (within reason – you can’t get too cheaky). Not just the key member reporting the issue with the “everyone tells me they are encountering the same issue” details.

    The old classics …
    Ask for screenshots….
    I have had screen shots sent to me by people who obviously didn’t know how to make their system take an image of their screen….
    I recieved what was obviously someone putting a 15″ CRT monitor onto a scanner and hitting the scan button and then sending me that as a screen shot….. I am not joking…
    As it was obviously warped and the scanned image was faded and, more importantly it was a pain in the a$$ problem to fix, I rejected the scanned image as not suitable and asked them to contact their IT for a proper scanned image. ( Bought me 32 hours that one )

    The outsourced company is full of it staff of varying levels of quaulity but we have managers that demand value for money…. Demand as in whiteboard at the end of the office showing weekly, who is going and who is staying if they do not up their game !

    However, we had one client that negotiated SEV 1′s at 3 hours with a $20,000 per minute breach payment.. Our company signed the deal. Long story short, breached for 4 hours due to a secondary power supply not being plugged in. Primary failed.. Took 7 hours to get service back up and running… Client must have though Christmas had come early….. NP We will get it back ;)

    Before you sign with an outsourcer hoping to save yourself a bundle of cash, read the small print and read between the lines as to how they work. If you were an outsourcing manager, how would you run it if you had to run it for maximum profit ?

    Z

  • http://www.deepstorage.net Howard Marks

    Remember this applies to your hardware support too. They have to send a tech in 4 hours but he doesn’t have to bring the PARTS.

    I once had Compaq tell me a new SCSI backplane for a server was 4 weeks! A new server 2 days.

    So I bought the new server, swapped backplanes and sent the new server back telling AP not to pay.

    Took a bit of yelling to resolve that one.

    Now I prefer to have spares.

    and don’t get me started with the tech that said that my swapping out a failed hard drive for a spare voided my contract.

    DeepStoragenet

  • Eth

    Strangely thats how you people work.. Big fuzz and no results. I did work in IT support company, we had time to reaction (which is about 30 mins for gold customers, 1 hour for rest) and time to fix. This involved (without calls) checking equipment by engineer, contacting appropriate specialist (would it be network support, server support or a spare part department) for immidiate fixage. Never had a single SLA TTR 2 hours violation. In worst case scenario the replacement was put in (would it be network hardware or pc/laptop) or server replacement (weeker, etc, but still going with functions) with a backup restoration (preinstalled stuff). The only thing we messed up our 2 hours TTR was exchange server raid 5 full failure, with huge data restoration process, but we still fit into 7 hours from notification.