One of the most important factors of your business success is your reputation with your customers. That includes the quality of service you deliver to them. In many companies that means the CRM application. Your CRM is a critical component in the service landscape. It’s mission critical. Without it, you can’t service your customers optimally. Your reputation would be damaged. You would lose business. You would lose customers. You would lose money.

For vendor provided and maintained products that are viewed as mission critical, a maintenance contract is almost always provided by the vendor. For IT services such as CRM, it’s a Service Level Agreement (SLA). A Service Level Agreement is a written commitment from a vendor to a customer about the quality of service that the customer can expect.

A good example is the SuiteCRM SLA provided by the SalesAgility Support Team. This requires that we respond in less than 30 minutes to a Severity One issue. Severity One means that your system is completely down.

  • We delivered 100% Severity One compliance in Q1, 2018. We also did it 100% in Q4 2017.

If your system is compromised but is still running, we have Severity Two response times.

  • We delivered 100% Severity Two compliance in Q1, 2018. But we badly blotted our copybook in Q4, 2017. We missed one (1) Severity Two deadline. Since then we’ve doubled down to get back to where we want to be.

In total, we have four Severity levels. In Q1, 2018 we delivered 100% compliance across every metric. And we did this when overall growth is in high double digits.

The reason we do this is simple: the only companies that will succeed in open source are those that deliver extraordinary service quality to their customers. In open source, there is no vendor lock-in. Customers can buy their support and development services anywhere. If customers can buy services anywhere, vendors need to deliver a quality of service that is so high that the customer never considers alternative suppliers.

Salesforce

Contrast this with Salesforce: they do not offer an SLA as standard. That bears repeating: If you are running your mission critical CRM with Salesforce, the CRM that your reputation relies on, all you get from Salesforce is a promise to “use commercially reasonable efforts to make the online Services available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week”. You can’t go anywhere else to buy support. You can only use Salesforce. It’s in their cloud. Only they can deliver support.

If you tackle Salesforce about this, they’ll point to their uptime. They’ll point to Salesforce “Trust”. They’ll point to their investment in technologies. They won’t point to the time their outages meant that thousands of customers lost vital data and CRM was unavailable for more than 12 hours.

They sure didn’t hit 100% SLA compliance that week. In reality, they can never hit 100% SLA compliance because they don’t make any hard promises. They can never fail and they can never measure. But they will use “commercially reasonable efforts”.

SuiteCRM

With SuiteCRM you have choice. You can get the SuiteCRM SLA provided by the SalesAgility Support Team and make sure that your mission critical CRM is working. Learn more about it on the support plans page, or at SuiteASSURED, the total care package for SuiteCRM.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have an SLA. And I’d rather have choice.