An SLA that promises response time promises nothing
The claim Nearly every IT support agreement in this market is written around response time. A one-hour response commitment is satisfied by an automated ticket acknowledgement. It o...
The claim
Nearly every IT support agreement in this market is written around response time. A one-hour response commitment is satisfied by an automated ticket acknowledgement. It obliges the vendor to notice you, not to fix anything, and the difference between those two things is where every unhappy support relationship begins.
The three numbers, and which one you are being sold
- Response time: a human acknowledges the ticket. Cheap to promise, trivially automatable, almost always what is in the contract.
- Time to engagement: someone qualified begins working on the problem. Rarely offered, and the one you actually want.
- Resolution time: the problem is fixed. Legitimately hard to guarantee, because some causes are outside the vendor's control.
A vendor who will not commit to resolution targets is being honest. A vendor who will not commit to time to engagement is telling you your ticket may sit in a queue after being acknowledged, which is exactly the failure you are trying to buy protection against.
Severity definitions do more work than the clock
An agreement with tight targets and vague severity definitions is worse than a loose agreement with precise ones, because the vendor classifies the ticket. Define the levels in the contract, in terms of business impact, not technical symptoms:
| Level | Definition | Engagement | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Revenue-generating service unavailable to all users | 30 min, 24/7 | Every 60 min |
| P2 | Major function degraded, or one site or department down | 2 h, business hours | Every 4 h |
| P3 | Individual user blocked, workaround exists | Next business day | Daily |
| P4 | Request, question, or scheduled change | 5 business days | On completion |
Add one clause that is worth more than the whole table: the client sets the initial severity, and any downgrade requires the client's written agreement. Without it, P1 tickets have a way of becoming P2s at 17:00 on Friday.
Service credits are not a remedy
Do the arithmetic on the credit clause before you take comfort from it. On a $2,400 CAD per month contract, a typical 5% credit for a missed target is $120. If the outage cost you a day of order intake, the credit is not compensation — it is an apology with a number attached. Vendors know this, which is why credits are the easiest thing to agree to.
Two clauses have real force instead:
- Termination for chronic failure. Three missed P1 targets in any rolling quarter gives you the right to terminate for cause with 30 days' notice and no early-exit fee. This is the clause vendors negotiate hardest, which tells you what it is worth.
- Documented handover on exit. Credentials, network diagrams, licence inventory, and a named transition contact, delivered within 15 business days of notice, regardless of the reason for leaving. Get this in writing while everyone is friendly.
Define the coverage window precisely
"Business hours" is not a definition. Write down the time zone, the days, the treatment of Ontario statutory holidays, and what happens to a P1 raised at 16:55 on December 23rd. Vendors serving clients across several provinces frequently staff to Eastern time and quietly leave a Pacific client's morning uncovered. If your warehouse runs a night shift or your storefront is open Saturdays, those hours need to appear in the agreement by name, not be assumed.
What to ask before signing
Ask for last quarter's actual numbers, not the targets: median and 90th-percentile time to engagement by severity, and the count of P1s. A vendor with a functioning service desk can produce that report in a day. A vendor who cannot is either not measuring or would rather you did not see it, and both answers are informative.
Then ask the operational questions the contract will not cover. Who answers at 02:00 on a statutory holiday — an engineer or an answering service? How many clients does that person cover? Is monitoring included in the fee, or billed as a project? Roughly what does a P1 at 03:00 cost above the monthly retainer, if anything?
A reasonable shape
For a 40-person Canadian business, a workable agreement is a monthly fee covering monitoring, patching, backup verification, and unlimited P3 and P4 tickets, with P1 and P2 engagement targets attached to the severity table above and a quarterly review of the actual numbers. Expect somewhere between $3,000 and $9,000 CAD per month depending on the estate. What you should not accept at any price is a one-hour response commitment with no definition of what happens in hour two.
