SLA

An SLA is a clear, written commitment about the quality of ongoing support: How quickly do we respond when something goes wrong? How reliably is your site available? Instead of vague promises, it's there in black and white — what you can count on.

For you, that means certainty without small print: you know in advance what you'll get when it matters — not only once things are on fire. We only write in commitments we can actually keep; honest rather than overblown.

An example: at a tax advisory practice, the website goes down on a Friday afternoon — and with it the portal through which clients upload documents. Without an SLA, the guessing game begins: who is actually responsible, is anyone reachable at the weekend, and by when will someone deal with it? With an SLA, all of that is in the contract: whom the report goes to, within what deadline a response comes, and how an emergency is distinguished from an everyday problem.

Such an agreement usually contains a few recurring building blocks: the response time, meaning the deadline for the first qualified reply; the availability of support, meaning on which days and at which hours reports are handled; the uptime, meaning how reliably the website should be reachable; and the classification of incidents — because a typo is not an emergency, while a total outage is. On top of that comes the provision for what applies if a commitment is not kept. Once you know these building blocks, you can go through any contract with them in mind.

How to tell that you are missing such an agreement: you do not know whom you would call in the event of an outage. Replies to fault reports arrive sometimes after an hour, sometimes after a week. Or the contract effectively says only »we will take care of it« — with no deadline, no support hours, no consequences for non-compliance.

You can clarify a good deal yourself, without any specialist knowledge: take your existing contracts and look for three details — the promised response time, the support hours, and the provision for what happens if the promise is not kept. If one of them is missing, ask in writing. A reputable provider answers such questions without evasion — and whoever dodges them is telling you something too. Keep the answers; in a dispute, what counts is what exists in writing, not what was assured on the phone.

A common misunderstanding: that response time means the problem will be solved within that time. In fact the response time only says when someone will respond in a qualified way and start work. How long the solution takes depends on the problem — no one can seriously guarantee that across the board. What matters is that the contract distinguishes cleanly between the two.

Conexa Digital only writes commitments into agreements that can actually be kept — honest rather than inflated. Response times, support hours and responsibilities are set down before the collaboration begins, so that in an emergency both sides know what applies and nobody has to negotiate mid-outage.