MageMontreal’s after-sale, client Service Level Agreement (SLA)
The SLA (Service Level Agreement) sets expectations for the after-sales level of service. Once your website is delivered/once this project is completed: this is the speed at which we handle new work requests.
We always try to reply to any of your requests within 24 business hours or faster if we can.
The work production schedule is then discussed with you and set on for the next available production date.
We do give a special priority to MSP (Managed Service Plan) clients.
Guarantee of availability: once the project is completed, for future request the only way fast availability can be guaranteed is through the use of a “retainer system” or our MSP offer which reserves a developer’s time exclusively for you during that time period.
If you are a client who purchases a retainer or our flagship offer the MSP or MSP+ (Managed Service Plan), will then have work capacity reserved and guaranteed exclusively to you every week, so there is no waiting for requests to go into production up to the reserved retainer or MSP limit. Therefore with an MSP plan, there is no risk of us being out of production capacity to accommodate a deadline or a last-minute request.
MSP & RETAINER: Support work or new requests starts same day or next business day in most cases when possible: (or maximum delay is within your retainer’s time period which is weekly/within 5 business days of receiving the request, will be started and delivered.* *If you purchase an 8h/week (1day/week) retainer, then we will guarantee the delivery of up to 8h of work per 5 business days period.
Please also see in the next section below the definition of support work vs project work. (Anything above 4 hours is project work and would be scheduled at a later date, the above turn around time is for support work.)
TIMEBANKS: a prepaid timebank, gives the discount on the hourly rate. Nevertheless, the timebank does not give the benefits of guaranteed availability as the Retainer or MSP plan does. Prepaid timebank work goes in the queue for service just like the no retainer plan, but is less expensive because it is prepaid and there is no longterm or monthly commitment.
NO RETAINER & NO TIMEBANK : Even tho the future work requests will always starts as soon as possible…. availability and delays (even for times banks) cannot be guaranteed. ONLY with a retainer or MSP approach can availability and delays be guaranteed on future requests and support. Work will be typically scheduled to start in about 10+ business days but is subject to availability.
EMERGENCIES: By default, the moment a ticket is set to EMERGENCY, it is billed and treated as premium support with the 50% extra fees to the hourly rate and a minimum billable intervention of 1 hour regardless if it takes less time to solve the emergency.
We do have an exception on the premium fees for what we call a “UNIVERSAL EMERGENCY” which is defined as the following:
A new issues which just occurred now, resulting in:
1) The website is down.
2) The server is down.
3) As a user, when clicking the add to cart button, it does not add to the cart.
4) As a user, none of the offered payment methods works; I cannot pay at all to check out and/or I cannot buy the content of my cart.
Anything else which is not a “Universal Emergency” and is simply defined as just an “Emergency” in the client’s words or is a task set by the client as an Emergency ticket and will have premium fees for an Emergency request.
There are NO other exceptions whatsoever to the waiving of the premium fees for emergency requests.
For further clarification, any design or feature issues that are not preventing the normal order flow criteria as described in points 1 to 4 above isn’t considered a Universal Emergency.
We will service the Emergency request as soon as we see it and can access a computer.
The programmer assigned to your account may sometimes be on the road when an emergency is declared and need a reasonable amount of time of up to 2 hours to travel and get to his computer to handle the issue, he will do so as soon as reasonably possible.
If you submit an emergency request and we have not replied within 20 minutes, it is the client’s responsibility to call our office to verify if we have received the emergency request, for the emergency SLA terms to be valid.
ii) * Holiday and vacations periods: During employee’s holidays and vacation periods the speed of service of the SLA can vary and be slower than the expected SLA delays such as around the Christmas & New Year’s period: approximately mid-December to mid-January and the summer vacations being usually sometime in July and or August or it could be a different summer vacation periods, exact employees vacation dates and periods vary from year to year. If you wish you can confirm with your project manager when your assigned employee’s vacations will be and when or if it would affect your SLA service delay/speed during those periods.
iii) Extraordinary circumstances such as a website virus infection, hacker attack, or server/website downtime, if possible, will be handled faster than the SLA at the developer’s discretion and assessment of the urgency of the exceptional circumstance. Emergencies are handled on business days only as developer’s office is not open on weekend, nights, holidays, or evenings unless requested to be available “on call” during a specific weekend or holiday for which there is an extra fee to be “on call” on those specific dates.
iv) Nights, late evenings/past 6pm work and weekend work can also be scheduled at a 50% premium of the hourly rate conditional to developer’s availability and acceptation.
v) Retainer & Time bank payment terms: all work performed with either a retainer or MSP or a time bank approach is 100% prepaid upfront.
vi) Retainer & Time bank renewal: To give you a very responsive service level and efficient workflow for your requests of up to 8 work hours: Once your time bank is depleted, we will automatically charge your credit card to refill it with another 8 hours time bank credit (even if the new work order is less than 8 hour of work). If at any point you do not wish to automatically renew the time bank simply specify in writing to not renew it. We request to please provide us a valid credit card on file at all times for this automatic charge, we will fill together the recurring billing agreement in annex (as detailed below in subsection (2.G.)
vii) Retainers vs timebank : retainer do not rollover stack up or accumulate: unlike timebanks (which does not expire but does not guarantee availability), retainers are a “use it or lose it” approach which allows guaranteeing the availability of the developer, it could be compared to booking a hotel room on a specific date/period of rental. We do not want you to lose the time which you purchased, so we will ask some instructions from you if you do not give us some or so you do not lose your paid work time we will spontaneously perform some analysis and improvements to your website that we feel could improve your web presence or website’s design or content or ergonomic, etc and we will get you to approve the changes
viii) Support is part of our business: we are there to help and support your business. All maintenance work and support time after the launch date is billable work time, with the exception of the bug warranty as described in section 12 of the terms below if applicable.
ix) Respect of SLA: if ever any employee fails to reply to you within the above time frame, the client is expected to report it to the employee’s manager and the problem will be addressed or a new replacement employee could be assigned to your account if necessary.