How do you set up a service level agreement?

Required tools

• Dynamics 365 Customer Service — With access to service-level agreements.
• Defined opening hours — The deadlines shall be calculated in working hours.

Define the agreement

1. 1.Decide what to measure

   Time to first response and time to resolution. Start with the first response—it is the easiest to influence and the first thing the customer notices.

2. 2.Set work schedule calendar

   Without it, the deadline continues to run through the night and over the weekend. This means that everything received on Friday afternoon will be in breach, even though no one has done anything wrong.

3. 3.Differentiate by severity

   Critical, normal, and low, each with its own deadline. A single shared deadline will either be too strict for everything or too lenient for urgent matters.

Deploy

1. 4.Add a warning before a breach

   An alert at eighty percent of the deadline provides an opportunity to take action. An alert after a breach is merely reporting.

2. 5.Test with a real case

   Create a case, verify that the timer starts, stops when a response is received, and calculates correctly over a weekend. The weekend calculation is where the errors occur.

3. 6.Monitor the fulfillment rate weekly

   If you are at ninety percent, the deadlines are probably realistic. At fifty percent, they are unrealistic, and the figure then loses all value as management information.