Service Level Agreement

Severity Levels

Support requests will be sorted into three Severity Levels:

1. Critical: errors resulting in complete non-availability of the service, e.g. all requests return an HTTP error code 500. Errors such as these should be picked up by our monitoring systems and escalated automatically. 
2. Degraded: errors resulting in the non-availability of a subset of the service while the wider service continues to operate. Errors such as these should be picked up by our monitoring systems and escalated automatically.
3. Non-Critical: minor bugs that do not substantially affect the service, or minor feature/content adjustment requests.

Severity levels will be assessed by SocietyWorks Ltd when we become aware of the problem. Alerts generated by our monitoring systems will be assumed to be Critical until assessment and triage is complete when they may be re-categorised.

A critical support request can be made by the Customer. These must a) be made by raising a ticket on Freshdesk, having accessed the allocated client account on Freshdesk (set-up as part of Project Kick-Off), and b) be raised by choosing the priority field Urgent, starting the subject field with Urgent and selecting that this is a Problem (as opposed to a Question or Work Request). Freshdesk tickets are monitored and responded to within Business Hours; outside these our monitoring systems should ensure that Severity 1 and 2 issues are detected and escalated appropriately.

The following matrix represents the time frames within which SocietyWorks Ltd will act in response to support requests of different severities. In the matrix, unless otherwise specified, Hours refer to Business Hours, and Days refer to Working Days.

Exclusions

Subsequent to an outage, of any Severity level, if it is determined as part of a review that an outage was 100% a result of The Customer’s software services or third party software providers, and therefore deemed out of the control of SocietyWorks Ltd it will not be subject to the terms of this Service Level Agreement. 

Business Hours

Business hours run from 9am to 5pm (London local time) on weekdays other than bank or public holidays in England. SocietyWorks Ltd will, at the commencement of the agreement and from time to time thereafter, designate a contact for outside business hours and provide the client with their contact details.

Maintenance Windows

Notice must be given by SocietyWorks Ltd to the Customer at least 48 hours prior to any proposed system maintenance that would result in the non-availability of the Service, which shall normally be expected to take no more than three (3) hours to perform such maintenance.

If more than three (3) hours is required to perform non-emergency maintenance, SocietyWorks Ltd  must provide five (5) Working Days’ notice, subject to the Customer’s consent, not to be unreasonably withheld.

Notice periods for maintenance shall be waived if SocietyWorks Ltd, at its sole discretion, has reason to believe that non-performance of maintenance would result in non-availability or insecure operation of the Service or would put SocietyWorks Ltd in breach of the law or an order of a court of competent jurisdiction, in any of these cases SocietyWorks Ltd will use best endeavours to notify the Customer as soon as possible.

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If you require any further information about our Service Level Agreement, please speak to your account manager or contact us on enquiries@societyworks.org.