What is a service level agreement?

Three parts make one worth signing. A metric you can verify, a threshold, and a remedy that costs the vendor something.

Drop the third part and you have marketing. Plenty of agreements promise a number, then define the compensation as a credit you must claim inside a short window. Almost nobody claims it.

Read the exclusions before the number. Scheduled maintenance, carrier faults and force majeure usually sit outside the measured period. Together they cover most of the outages you would notice.

For a phone product the measurement question is where. A vendor measuring at their own servers can report a clean month while your calls failed at the carrier.

Suppose a phone vendor's agreement promises 99.9% monthly availability. For each 0.1% below target you get a credit of 5% of the monthly fee, capped at 25%. Claims must be filed within 30 days, and scheduled maintenance with 48 hours' notice doesn't count.

You pay $149 a month. One Tuesday the service is down from 9:00 until 3:00, six hours in a 720-hour month. Availability for the month comes out at 99.17%, which is seven tenths of a point under target. Seven steps at 5% would be 35%, so the cap applies and your credit is 25% of $149, or $37.25.

Now price the outage from your side. If you normally take 40 calls on a Tuesday and a fifth of them are new customers, eight people who might have hired you heard nothing. The agreement values that day at $37.25, and only if you remember to file the claim by the deadline.

People in contact centers use the phrase service level for something different: the share of calls answered within a set number of seconds. The classic target is 80/20, meaning 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds. It's an internal staffing measure with no contract behind it.

Support response times get called an SLA too. A promise to reply to your ticket within four hours says nothing about when the fault gets fixed. The clock also starts when you report it, not when the trouble began.

When a salesperson says they have an SLA, ask which of the three they mean. Then ask where availability is measured, at their servers or at the point your calls arrive. Who detects an outage, them or you? Is the credit automatic? What did they pay out in credits last year?

That last question rarely gets a number in reply. How they handle being asked is still informative. A vendor whose agreement has never cost them anything has either a perfect record or a remedy nobody manages to claim.

GreetKeeper publishes no uptime figure and offers no service level agreement. We have not run long enough to have measured one honestly, and a number we invented would be worth nothing to you.

That is a real gap, and if a contractual guarantee is a requirement for you, an established vendor is the better buy today.

What we can tell you is how the product behaves when something breaks: calls follow the fallback rule you set, which usually means they ring your own number instead.