Priority Level Definitions
The priority of response times to emails, telephone calls and on-site attendance, where necessary, is determined by Urgent, High, Normal and Low Priority. As there is a broad range of industry, business size, type and technology reliance, the determination of the priority will be requested by the responding Sterling IT engineer and confirmed if correctly allocated. Work will be performed in preference of Sterling IT Managed IT Professional, Essentials and then non Sterling IT Managed IT customers.
Business Hours are Mon-Fri 8:30AM – 5:00PM (excluding Christmas Shutdown and Public Holidays)
Support outside of these hours will incur additional charges, unless prearranged and agreed prior booking.
Response times are based on a time to respond to a problem or request, and not a resolution time, due to the complexity of certain issues.
Whether the job is urgent or low, our team will always try to endeavour to respond as quickly as possible, however with larger events or issues, resources may be stretched at these times.
Typical events constituting response times of Urgent, High, Normal, and Low Priority issues include, but are not limited to:
URGENT – Significant loss or effect of income to the business
- Major disaster: e.g. loss of essential server/s, mission-critical LAN or widespread loss of communications
- Inability for everyone to access a critical application
- Printing problems across multiple printers
- Multiple users are being prevented from serving company customers
- Data being lost/corrupted
- Network down
- Problem appears to be related to a security breach
- Inability to function at an important event or business presentation
HIGH – Business is operational, but the effect of the issue is causing major productivity loss, company stress, or a degree of effect of income to the business.
- Crash/no access to/non-availability of a non-essential server
- Important workstation down and/or unusable where the user or function cannot be accessed elsewhere
- Constant error generation from fundamental processes
- System constantly producing incorrect results in isolated circumstances
NORMAL (Most common and default) – General request for service or support that should be considered as priority, but is not stopping the business from functioning and creating revenue.
- Non critical workstation down and/or unusable
- Local printer/scanner problems
- User is unable to process a particular type of service but has simple alternative
- User prevented from performing low priority work
- Only one of many users is affected
- Users being prevented from serving internal requests
- System produces incorrect results in a known and isolated set of circumstances which can be worked around
LOW – Request for service or support that has no effect on the business from creating revenue or stopping a user from performing their day to day tasks.
- Program updates, installations, and cosmetic changes
- Planned downtime
- Manual instruction