Support Offers trend for more aggressive SLOs and SLAs
Hello,
as we entered 2021, maybe as a result of the 2020 pandemic, we see our customers requesting more aggressive SLOs/SLAs.
We have implemented an already Business Critical offer with response times of 15m and resolution of 4h, but still we see requests for even more aggressive ones.
Do you see the same trend?
And what the customers call it/refer to as?
Just want to have some insights on requests you might have and by what names such offers are referred as (Business Critical seems already an aggressive straight to the point in my view)
Thanks a lot!
Goncalo
Answers
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Hello Goncalo,
This is an excellent question! @Daniel Coullet , @Justin Nuzum , @Sumit Bhat; it would be interesting to get your perspectives on SLOs and SLAs change requests from customers. Have you any of you noticed pressure from customers for shorter SLA time frames.
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100% - the trend is for all vendors, and not just SaaS ones, to provide defined SLAs with penalties when your solutions are considered mission critical to the customer's business. Most companies prefer to commit to an achievable time to relief, since this can be a full resolution or a workaround, and put a clear mandate on the customer to have deployed a solution built for high availability and maintained under strict guidances.
Additionally, you can tie your "Business Critical' offer to a CSM/SAM/TAM service as part of a higher touch engagement, which will also reduce your risk of not being able to meet your contractual obligations.
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Hi @Goncalo Pereira @Spencer Hancock ,
Yes we have seen this trend as well , in my past experience we have used AMC Support (Advanced Mission Critical) nomenclature for such offerings . Its natural for customers to demand penalties and aggressive SLA's for their critical infrastructure, in my experience these offerings need to be priced way higher than any of your premium offerings. Since in order to deliver it you end up having dedicated resources , your ticketing system needs to be tweaked for the new SLA objectives and the list goes on and if its a on-prem product your opex significantly goes up. From a numbers preceptive you need to also run the projected costs and define a cut-off deal size (ARR) in order for AMC to be sustainable, in my opinion it should be a fraction of your tier-1 customers depending on the size of the organization. In case you end up getting more than a very small fraction of customers demanding AMC, its not sustainable and is a indication that your standard/premium SLA's need to be reworked to be competitive. Hope you find these additional insights useful.
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Hi,
thanks a lot @Sumit Bhat & @David Perrault for the great insights.
We are thinking the same, such offer should not be available off the shelf and needs to be evaluated on deal-by-deal approach.
Also, we are taking into consideration a bigger picture, meaning, it's not only having an aggressive SLO/SLA offer and staff the support organization to support it, the product(s) to which this is offer is being considered must also ensure a set of requirements to guarantee they are manageable under this new offer, otherwise it can easily turn into a support nightmare.
Thankyou
Goncalo
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