TOPDESK 11

SLM IN TOPDESK 5.4:

A STRAIGHTFORWARD WAY
TO SET UP YOUR SLAs
The Contract Management and SLM module has been
completely revamped for TOPdesk 5.4. You can easily attune
the duration of your SLA services (Service Level Agreements)
to your customers. One of the modules new features is the
so-called Service Level Priority Matrix in which you can dene
the durations of your SLA service levels in detail.
Clarity in your services
You can use the Contract Management and
SLM module in your organization for two
purposes: on the one hand for registering SLA
contracts and the corresponding SLA services,
on the other hand for managing agreements
with suppliers. The latter means that you can
register the supplier contracts and services.
The former has signicantly improved
with the 5.4 update: in the new Contract
Management and SLM module you can link
the correct durations to the correct services
in fewer steps.
For example: Your organization provides 15
SLA services, including Printer Maintenance,
with the SLA service levels Gold, Silver and
Bronze. This situation gives 45 possible
combinations for your SLA contracts: Printer
Maintenance Silver, for example. These
combinations needed to be registered
separately in the old SLM. This is a lot of
work when you have multiple service levels.
In Contract Management and SLM 5.4, every
SLA service level has its own TOPdesk card
that can be linked to several services. In this
example you work with only 18 different
TOPdesk cards instead of 45.
One service level, multiple
durations
The newly introduced Service Level Priority
Matrix lets you indicate per service level
which durations apply to which situations.
If one employees printer is broken, and he
or she only needs to print meeting minutes,
this obviously has a lower priority than
a situation where the company printer
everyone uses to print order forms breaks
down. You can address these differences
in impact and urgency in the service level
Priority Matrix. This ensures that your
services duration always matches the
situation at hand.
Before you can use the new Priority Matrix
you need to determine which impact and
urgency values your organization uses
when registering calls in Call Management.
Impact deals with the extent of the problem:
how many people are affected? Commonly
used impact values are: Organization,
Ofce, Department and Employee.
Text: Luke van Velthoven
Urgency determines the importance of
the organizational division: Core activity,
Supporting Service and Non-Urgent Service
are logical choices.
Subsequently, you can choose the rst
and second line duration for each impact-
urgency combination. The printer used by
one person from our example is now linked
to the Employee-Non-Urgent Service, while
the broken down company printer belongs to
the Organization-Core Activity combination.
It is up to you how the SLA service levels
inuence the calls duration. In the module
settings you can choose two ways to ll in
the Priority Matrix on service level cards: by
linking priorities to standard durations, or by
creating completely independent durations
for the rst and second line.
Option 1: Priority Matrix with
standard priorities
If your organization has standard durations, it
is most efcient to use the pre-set priorities
for lling in the Priority Matrix. The rst and
second line durations belonging to a specic
priority can be adjusted in the module
settings. It is a good idea to ll in these
values before you start registering service
levels in TOPdesk. This ensures that all your
cards have the same standard durations. The
information on the current SLM cards does
not automatically change when the module
settings are adjusted. After all, this could be
undesirable for current SLA contracts.
As you can see in image 1, you only need
to determine per service level (in this case
Gold) what the standard priority is, and
which priority applies to which impact-
urgency combination. The corresponding
durations are automatically lled in. By
making the priorities principal in your SLA
contracts, you can make sure that new
service level cards are easy to create and
that your operators can always estimate the
duration for each priority.
Option 2: Deviating from the
standard
It is of course possible that the priorities are
mostly useful for processing calls from your
own employees, but are not suitable for the
SLA contracts your organization has with
12 TOPDESK
Image 1: A service level with
(standard) priorities
TOPDESK 13
third parties. The set durations of priorities
are after all valid all throughout TOPdesk.
A customer can have his printer xed in an
hour, while the highest priority within your
organization has a rst line duration of at
least four hours, for example. In this case,
you can choose to make the durations of
your service levels independent of existing
priorities, and even give them independent
rst and second line durations.
After all, these independent durations are
no longer tied to existing priorities, and you
can easily adjust the durations of your SLA
services per customer. Image 2 shows an
example of a service level card featuring
different arrangements. This option means
more registration work when creating
new cards. However, the extra effort is
rewarded with more specic agreements.
Every customer will receive the support they
want.
Image 2: A service level with independent
durations
Switching to Contract
Management and SLM 5.4
If you are interested in about the
improved Contract Management and
SLM module in TOPdesk 5.4 but have
registered a lot of data in previous
version, there is no need to worry. The
TOPdesk Extranet provides an update
manual explaining how these changes
may affect your organization. If your
organization does not have Contract
Management and SLM yet, our
consultants are happy to help you with
the implementation of this module.