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Most service commitments fail not on the time but on the clock: a four-hour response time that starts on Friday evening is long breached by Monday morning – without anyone having done anything wrong.
Whether you promise four hours or eight matters less than when those hours count. A deadline has to be tied to agreed service hours and pause outside them – weekends, public holidays and shutdowns included. Without that tie, every commitment is breached regularly for reasons that have nothing to do with the work. And a metric that is red for systematic reasons stops being looked at.
Time to the first qualified answer is in your hands: it depends on staffing and organisation. Time to resolution depends on the matter – on spare parts, on suppliers, on questions only the customer can answer. Promising both means one of them was promised carelessly. The clean version: response time binding, resolution time as a target with a rule for how and how often progress is reported.
Priorities only work if they are distinguished – and only what can be described gets distinguished. Three levels with one hard criterion have proven themselves: if operations are down, it is high. If they are restricted but a workaround exists, it is medium. Everything else is normal. What matters is that the classification is yours and not the caller's: let customers choose and within two weeks everything is high priority, which means nothing is.
| Level | Criterion | Response | Progress report |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | Operations down, no workaround | 2 service hours | daily |
| Medium | Restriction with workaround | 8 service hours | every 3 days |
| Normal | everything else | 2 service days | on request |
Response time ends with the first substantive answer from a person – an automatic acknowledgement does not count. Resolution time ends when the matter is settled. Only the first can be promised bindingly, because only it lies entirely in your hands.
Only if you are staffed around the clock. For most technical businesses a commitment within service hours is more honest and is accepted by customers – breached commitments cost more trust than a generous one ever earns.
Three. With four the middle ones blur, with five they get guessed. What matters is less the number than the criterion: it has to fit in one sentence and be applicable without asking back.
Managing Director, Entracon Planungsgesellschaft mbH
Engineer with a doctorate, specialising in plant engineering, digital design and process automation – from simulation through to commissioning.
A short conversation usually settles more than three quotations. You reach an engineer directly, not a queue.
Start typing – for example “balancer”, “SAP” or “pipe stress”.
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