Support SLAs get written in two ways. Either sales commits to numbers nobody in support has validated, or support writes something so hedged it commits to nothing. This template sits between the two: specific enough to be meaningful, structured so the numbers can be verified against your own data before you publish them.
Structure of the template
- Severity definitions with observable criteria rather than adjectives, so classification does not become a negotiation.
- Response and resolution targets per severity and per channel, with separate figures for business hours and out of hours.
- Business-hours definitions per region, including how holidays are handled, the most common source of SLA disputes.
- Escalation path with named roles and timeframes, and what the customer can do if a target is missed.
- Exclusions covering customer-side dependencies, third-party outages and requests that are genuinely change requests rather than support.
Before you publish it
Run your last quarter's conversations against the proposed targets and check the percentile you would actually have hit. Publishing a target you meet 80% of the time creates more work than it prevents. A defensible SLA is one you meet at the 95th percentile with your current staffing, not one that describes your median performance.
Reviewing it
Re-validate the numbers quarterly and after any material change in volume, channel mix or staffing. Keep a change log in the document itself; when a customer references an older commitment, that log is what resolves the conversation quickly.