OLA and SLA in Jira: How to increase your revenue

This article will explore service level management and how to benefit from the implementation of SLA and OLA in Jira.

• What is Service Level Management?
• 4 Key factors that influence customer experience (CX)
• SLA versus OLA: any difference?
• Increase your team efficiency with SLA Time and Report

_______________________________________________________________

“Quality of services doesn’t meet my needs” — the less desired phrase to hear for your business, or to spot it in your Jira ticket. 93% of individuals are likely to make repeat purchases with businesses that offer great customer service. Companies that are unable to fulfill consumer demand get lower sales and decreased profitability as a result. In Jira, you can keep your team on track with Jira Service Management by setting SLA goals for handling customer issues quickly. But how do you know your business is avoiding the “poor service quality” blacklist?

What is Service Level Management?

Service Level Management (SLM) is the process responsible for minimizing any adverse impact on service quality. It ensures compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Operational Level Agreements (OLAs), and Underpinning Contracts (UCs). Service level management is the link between Service Support and Service Delivery.

The main goal of SLM is to ensure that all current and planned services are supplied in compliance with agreed-upon objectives:

• Outline, register, monitor, measure, report, and check the levels of services that are provided.
• Set specific and measurable targets.
• Increase the level of communication and improve the relationship between customers and the business.
• Ensure that the level of service expected is clear for both: customers and providers.
• Observe the expectations, enhance the degree of customer satisfaction and aim to improve them even after targets are met.

Everything is about customer experience (CX) here. If you place your customer on top priority and invest in CX initiatives, you’ll be able to double your revenue within 36 months. SaaS companies, in particular, can expect to increase revenue by $1 billion, according to SuperOffice.

4 Key factors that influence customer experience

In order to raise your customers’ loyalty, you need to understand their behavior and tailor your efforts to deliver personalized services. Customer experience is influenced by a number of key aspects. Let’s focus on some of them.

Personalization

Collect all the possible information to have a full history of interactions between your customers and the company. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to record specific details about your clients: their statuses, deal types, past purchases or issues. Furthermore, you can migrate data from Jira to CRM. That helps to understand your customers even better. Here is a short instruction on how to Sync SLA with CRM to Increase Customers Loyalty.

User onboarding

Think about the most effective ways to make user onboarding as smooth as possible. It can be guides, emails, documentation, in-app notifications, checklists, product tours, video tutorials, or any combination of them. Actually, it’s a continuous process, as SaaS onboarding aims to help new users get started and stay engaged.

Real-time collaboration

It usually requires the implementation of a robust customer support platform with real-time communication capabilities.

Jira enables support teams to achieve their service level goals and evaluate CX with:

Real-time reporting helps to track team performance and find bottlenecks in the workflow process.

Real-time communication – the support team needs to ensure an effective way of communicating with its client and other team members. It’s easy to assign the support tickets to the right agent with detailed info about the issue.

Faster resolution

To get a happy customer, you need to put in all efforts to cope with raised issues quickly. When a user informs your team about an issue, it’s critical to keep the mean time to resolution (MTTR) as low as possible. Incident Management involves interaction between different teams: support, development, QAs, etc.

All the described factors are effects of your company-customers relationships as well as inside-the-company (between teams and departments) communication. Let’s look at how you can improve it with Jira SLA and OLA implantation.

SLA versus OLA: any difference?

Service Level Agreements (SLA) is an external commitment between the entire company and its customers. It’s like a checklist of services and their quality that should be followed by the provider to ensure customer satisfaction. The main question to answer: does my business meet the expectations?

Operational Level Agreements (OLA) is an internal commitment that the company defines for employees to meet SLA. It outlines the roles, responsibilities, activities, procedures, and policies between different organization departments. The main question to answer: how should my business act to set the expectations?

OLA will give a clear understanding of:

1. What will the server team do in terms of server patching?
2. How will the service desk handle incidents and requests?
3. How will different teams (development, support, process, security, testing team, etc.) interact?

It’s hard to properly facilitate and fulfill SLAs without having and employing an OLA.

Increase your team efficiency with SLA in Jira

Now, let’s move to SLA and OLA in Jira and find out how you can win from the SLA Time and Report add-on by SaaSJet. It allows you to customize SLA timers to your Jira issues. SLA should start once an issue has been created for the selected project.

SLA Example:

Your customer faced an issue and is waiting for help. The support team needs to be notified about it. Your goal is to resolve blocker issues within 36 hours. How you set this to practice with SLA Time and Report:

• Specify your SLA with flexible Start/Pause/Stop conditions. The timer will start when a user chooses a status Waiting for support, and will stop once Waiting for the customer is selected. Besides, it can be paused when Pending status is turned on. You can adjust these conditions to any options you need.

• Specify your time goals with Multi-triggers. You can set a time limit for each SLA configuration and choose the Automated action for exceeded issues. E.g. Time limit is 36 hours. When it’s over, the reporter will be changed from person A to person B.
• Add a specific work schedule for each SLA Condition. You can match the working hours of your team including lunch breaks, holidays, and weekends.

OLA Example:

Support passes the task to the next team – development. When the issue is fixed, it will come back to the support. It’s a simplified example. Actually, it may include some further steps like passing to QA for testing. How you set this to practice with SLA Time and Report:

The timer for Start/Pause/Stop condition will start when the support team chooses “To do” status, and will stop once developers select “Done” status.

You can also define time goals with Multi-triggers or work schedules as in the SLA example.

You can monitor SLA status data of Met/Exceeded and In progress issues in a Graph view:

SLA Time and Report for Jira allows sending notifications as a comment to a task, but you’ll receive an email from Jira about this action too. These notifications let you know when deadlines should be breached, and if you want to make changes to a task, you can move to it directly from that email. But there is often a need to create additional tasks, and it isn’t always convenient. In such a case, you can try the Email&Tasks: Jira Cloud for Gmail add-on, which is also available as a Chrome extension. Install once – use always.

Grand Takeaway

Customer service requires more than qualified teams. The keys to great services are responsibility and cooperation. That’s why you need to clearly define, negotiate, deliver, and review all the processes at every level with the help of Service Level Management.

It isn’t enough to put your SLA and OLA on paper or save the document. You need to carefully evaluate every aspect of the agreement and bring it to life. Consider not only the team members’ responsibilities but also tools that will help them to achieve their goals. With SLA Time and Report for Jira Cloud, you can make some automation to OLA and SLA. Try how it works with an online demo or subscribe for the free version to fit it for your company. 

Putting your SLAs and OLAs to practice helps you to understand and align your company’s internal processes and meet your customers’ expectations. The workflow will be uninterrupted, always on time, and the consumers will support the company. That means you’ve got more happy customers who will know you as a reliable vendor and come back for more purchases. 

If you need more details about the SLA Time and Report for Jira Cloud add-on, please, read our article and discover most of its functionality – Time to SLA for Jira issues – meet SLA Time and Report.