Can we talk about the trap of over-promising response times to clients?

I told a marketing agency client in Chicago we'd answer their support tickets within 2 hours, then a server crash hit on a Monday and we blew it by 6. Their IT guy screenshot the wait and called me out in a group email, and I had to explain that our 'SLA' was really just a hope, not a plan. We lost their renewal worth $18k over that one promise, but it taught me to put buffer time in every contract. Has anyone else gotten burned by a turnaround guarantee that looked good in writing? What do you quote now instead?

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richard_young8013d ago

So when you say the SLA was "really just a hope, not a plan," what did the new version actually look like on paper? Like did you start quoting 8 hours instead of 2, or did you split it into tiers where the crash type stuff gets a longer window than a password reset? I keep seeing people slap a number on the contract because it wins the deal, then quietly eat the overage every time something breaks at scale. Curious if you spelled out what counts as a real emergency versus a normal ticket, since a Monday server crash is not the same animal as someone asking where the invoice PDF is. Did the Chicago thing make you drop the guarantee altogether or just widen it?

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