How To Improve
Customer Satisfaction with SLAs

If you own or operate an ISP and you don't have a service level agreement in place, you're missing an opportunity to wrap an inexpensive marketing program around your basic customer service expectations.

by Christopher M. Knight
[December 13, 2000]

A Service Level Agreement, or SLA, is an accord between your Internet service and your customers. It enumerates point-by-point the level of performance that you expect your ISP to deliver to subscribers. A SLA also helps your customers understand what they can and can't expect from your ISP.

Each time you meet or exceed your SLAs—you build trust with your subscribers. Any time you fail to fulfill your SLAs—you destroy your customers confidence in your business.

Many ISPs do not provide SLAs for their basic dial-up subscribers—these ISP owners mistakenly believe that their Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) serves as a SLA. But these written guarantees are two very different agreements with two distinct purposes.

Managed expectations
If you don't manage your customers' expectations, your customers will begin to create their own service, which will result in allowing your customers to manage your ISP. Many ISP owners already understand that customer expectations are not necessarily realistic. Allowing your customer to set unrealistic expectations for your ISP leads to dial-up discord throughout your subscriber base.

A good SLA provides a better understanding of the relationship between you and your ISPs subscribers. It establishes the rules of the game—your customers understand the level of service that they can expect from you, while your staff understands that you expect them to meet or exceed your customer service expectations each day.

Fear of contracts
Many ISP owners are afraid of setting up SLAs because it seems that there are so many elements of the business that remain beyond your control—elements that your subscribers expect you to control.

For example, some customers might expect your ISP business to provide technical support for their PC, Local Area Network, or phone lines. A good SLA sets the tone for your ISPs relationship with customers and informs them what to level of support to expect for their dial-up services.

Granted, you can't always control your customers access to the Internet. Even when the worst happens and your upstream connection doesn't live-up to its 24x7x365 service guarantee, your customers are not going to call them when there's a problem with connectivity—they are going to call you. But even then, a good SLA could let your customers know what you can—and can not do.

Suitable terms
Good SLAs should always be written in proportion to the level of service that your clients expect. If your basic dial-up fee is $19.95 a month, chances are good that your ISP is providing customers with an equally basic level of service. Why not take the next step and put it in writing?

I'm not suggesting that you go wild and institute a monster SLA for your basic dial-up clients. It's unreasonable to provide dial-up customers with a SLA that could cost you thousands of dollars to deliver.

So what does it take to build a SLA for your ISPs customers? Let's look at a brief list of the benefits that you can guarantee basic dial-up customers in writing:

• Your account will be setup within 60-minutes during normal business hours.
• No busy signals, guaranteed.
• Your telephone call to technical support will be answered within 5-minutes during normal business hours.
• Email questions sent to technical support by 5 p.m. will be answered the same business day.
• Emails sent to support after 5 p.m. will be answered by 5 p.m. the next business day.
• Your monthly, quarterly or annual billing will be accurate.

A SLA for basic dial-up access can create the differentiating point that raises your ISP business above rival services, even if you are not guaranteeing anything more than your ISP business already delivers. The only difference is that you are willing to put it in print as a service level agreement—it's that easy.

Agreement antidotes
Now, let's chat about my favorite part of every SLA—the remedies section. The remedies section of a SLA puts in writing what will happen if your ISP business fails to meet the terms of your agreement with clients.

I'm assuming that when you don't deliver the services that you agree to provide for your customers, you also agree that you do not have the right to keep your customers money. Remember, I'm only talking about covering basic dial-up or entry-level webhosting services. So I suggest that you limit the dollar amount of the remedy to the fees customers paid during the service outage.

For example, let's say one of your RADIUS servers goes down over the weekend and you don't bring it back up until Monday. The service outage would result in many subscribers being frustrated by your Internet service because they were not able to log on until the server was rekicked. Since you provide your customers with a 100% uptime guarantee, and the service outage was completely within your control, your ISP business owes each client a two day service extension or a refund.

Marketing revelation
It doesn't cost you all that much to stand behind your ISP business with a SLA. For example, the weekend RADIUS outage would have meant that someone on your staff would have to collect the names of the customers that complained about the outage and then roll their billing date forward two days or issue a $1.28 credit to their account.

Better yet, you could inform your customers that your ISP not only "makes-good" on your SLA, it provides dial-up customers with more than they expect. For example, you could double the amount of time you credit subscriber accounts from two days to four, because doing so would still cost less than losing money and paying out a cash refund.

Expectation epitome
Service Level Agreements are a great way to improve customer confidence in your ISP business, reduce churn, and set service expectations for your clients and personnel.

If you build a SLA for dial-up accounts, you might find that your Internet service is in a leadership position, in your market, in no time, which can only be added into your ISPs bottom line—you might say its in to offer SLAs.

— End  

Related articles:
	[Oct. 19, 2000]	Creating Your Differentiating Point
	[Oct. 9, 2000]	Protect Your ISP With A Strong AUP