IRIS Recruitment

Service Level Agreements (SLA's)

This is not a legal document; the scope of this document is to guide customers on how their engagement with IRIS Service will work. Target response and resolution times quoted here may vary from some customer contracts.

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Support Services and SLA

Ticket Severity

IRIS Recruitment will decide which severity is given to each ticket. We will always consider the following points when applying a Severity.

  • What is the impact to you, the customer.

  • Is any other user able to perform the function needed.

  • How many users are affected.

  • Is this a fault with the system or a request for Enhancement / Bespoke.

If you are unhappy with the Severity assigned to your ticket, please make this known to your support team at the time. Customers are advised to follow the Escalation Process within this document if the dispute remains.

IRIS Recruitment follows a standard process which helps us determine the Severity of SLA we will assign to your ticket. The impact the issue has on the user / business is included in assessing the tickets SLA.

The customer has the right to escalate an issue immediately if they disagree with the Severity Level allocated by the IRIS Recruitment support team.

Severity Level 1 – Business Critical

Any ticket caused by the Software not conforming to the Documentation or Specifications that prevents the Software system from being used, and for which there is no software fix or workaround. Typically, this would include a regular or continuing loss of availability of the whole system to all users, or substantial data loss.

Examples of Severity Level 1:

  • No access to system for ALL client users.

  • Candidates unable to apply for ANY client vacancy with NO work around.

Severity Level 2 – Major

Any ticket caused by the Software not conforming to the Documentation or Specifications and that causes a significant loss of functionality in part of the Software but that does not prevent other major product features from being used, and for which there is no software fix or workaround. Typically, this would include system unavailability to some (but not all) users, or a failure of a major part of the system.

Examples of Severity Level 2:

  • No access to system for single or multiple users (not all users).

  • Candidates unable to apply for a given vacancy.

  • An area of the system not working for ALL users with no work around.

  • Unable to process a candidate with NO workaround.

  • Unable to progress a vacancy with NO workaround.

Severity Level 3 – Normal

Any ticket caused by the Software not conforming to the Documentation or Specifications that affects the operation of the Software, for which there is a software fix or workaround. This level also covers business critical queries, reporting and other tickets where advice is required on the best and proper use of the IRIS Recruitment system.

Examples of Severity Level 3

  • Advice & Guidance queries that cannot be resolved immediately.

  • General assistance where training HAS been received.

  • Tickets with minor impact to business functions.

  • Bug with a workaround.

  • Something not working with a workaround.

  • Something not working but not causing a Business Critical or Major issue.

  • Standard System Support.

Severity Level 4 – Non-Urgent / Change Requests

Any change request or ticket that is of minor significance, where a problem is not apparent to the majority of users, e.g. it cannot be reproduced by the customer or IRIS Recruitment.

Examples of Severity Level 4

  • Upload of data from spreadsheets.

  • Other mass data changes e.g. closing open vacancies.

  • Requests for new functionality.

  • No training has been received.

The nature of SLA 4 issues means that a quantifiable generic SLA cannot be provided. In which case, such tickets will be addressed on an individual basis.
Following discussion, the support team will provide a target Resolution date/time for the ticket (if applicable). The customer reserves the right to escalate if they are not satisfied with the proposed Resolution date/time

Key Service Levels

The time given for “Resolution SLA” is a total elapsed time, Subject to the provisions to the SLA and includes the time given under “Response SLA” Subject always to the Service Level Agreement the clock starts for “Response SLA” (and, by definition, “Resolution SLA”) from the moment the ticket is raised with the IRIS Recruitment support team or by the customer

SLA Timings

Severity Response Time Resolution Time** Description
1 30 mins 4 hours Business Critical
2 60 mins 8.5 hours Major
3 4 Hours 42.5 hours / 5 days* Normal / Standard
4 No SLA No SLA Non Urgent / Change Request

* Based on a 8.5 hour business day

** Excludes development time. Product releases are typically fortnightly. SLA clock is paused when we are waiting for a customer response.

SLA Mitigation

Inevitably, there are instances where a ticket will fail its SLA. Upon dealing with a failure in SLA the support team actively reviews the reasons for the failure in order to tighten our internal practises.

Where it is determined that an SLA has failed, and the reason for the failure is not due to IRIS Recruitment inability to resolve the ticket within the agreed time, the SLA will be mitigated and omitted (with justification) from reports.

SLA’s only count between service hours and are subject to stoppage times whilst waiting for customer response, customer testing, further information needed for diagnostics and customer availability.

Support Terms and Conditions

Support is provided 8.30 a.m. to 17.00 p.m. Monday to Friday excluding English Bank Holidays, SLA timings are dependent upon the time in which they are logged. Customers are advised that tickets logged outside the normal working hours will not be activated until the next normal business day. This includes weekends and bank/public holidays.

I.E, if a customer logs a ticket on Friday at 7pm, the ticket SLA will not start until9am the following Monday (if not a bank holiday) This is because the support team is not manned after hours.

SLA’s stop and start depending on the status of the ticket. If the support team is awaiting an action from the Customer so we can progress further, the SLA will be stopped and restarted once the customer’s action is complete.

Every reasonable measure will be made to ensure that SEVERITY 1 tickets are fixed within the agreed SLA, which may involve us working past 17:00, provided that they are logged within the normal hours of the support.

We strongly recommend that SEVERITY 1 tickets are voiced through to us to ensure maximum awareness.

Screen Shots

Screenshots displaying the problem are very useful to the support team when diagnosing most tickets and help to ensure a speedy resolution. You may be asked to supply detailed screenshots displaying your current screen information and provide data on the steps you took to get there. The support team's main challenge is to try to replicate any issues our customers are having, and these details are a big help.

Screen Sharing

Screen sharing may be requested by our support team to help view and diagnose issues that they cannot replicate by other means. NOTE - screen sharing will only be to view the desktop and not to take control.

Ticket Logging and Reference Numbers

Upon raising an ticket via either of these supported methods;

  • Through the IRIS Recruitment systems Support Tickets area (SLA Begins straight away).

  • Telephone (SLA begins once the ticket is logged).

    You will be supplied a ticket reference number. Updates to you regarding your ticket will be provided accordingly.

Ticket Escalation / Complaints

If you are not satisfied that your ticket has been handled according to this Service Level Agreement you can escalate your concern as follows:

There will always be a support team member available to manage an escalation in the event that the Customer Services Manager is not available.

If you wish to complain about any element of our support services, please contact the Customer Services Manager who will work with you to resolve your complaint.

Customer Responsibilities

The Customer will ensure that users are adequately trained on the IRIS Recruitment system. IRIS Recruitment will review support tickets and take appropriate action to identify and implement training needs.

IRIS Recruitment can only enforce the timescales described in this document if the person who raises the ticket is fully trained on the features of the Software that they are using.

IRIS Recruitment can only ensure that the timescales described in this document are met if customers provide all information requested of them in a timely manner.

Complaints from Candidates

If the candidate complaint is in relation to a specific vacancy or client then the candidate will be notified that their complaint has been forwarded to the client.

IRIS Recruitment will not perform any further actions about any complaints forwarded to the client unless directed by the client.

Out of Hours Support

Our service desk team is available Monday - Friday 08:30 - 17:00 excluding bank holidays.

Outside of the hours specified above, our customer portal has a Knowledge Centre to assist system users with the most common queries

As part of the candidate experience, we have “need help” buttons and links throughout the candidate journey which take candidates to our Candidate Help Hub to help them with their most common queries.

In the event our products and services are unavailable outside of our office hours, the following is in place to mitigate any service interruption to our users while our service desk team is unavailable

All our software services run on high availability architecture with no single point of failure anywhere in the architecture design.

  • We host all our software services with Rackspace.

  • We have intensive support services with Rackspace. Rackspace support operates 24/7/365.

  • The emergency ticket notifies our Technical Operations Team and Rackspace support to begin remediation steps immediately.

  • Rackspace support has operating instructions provided by IRIS Recruitment to instruct them how to bring the system back online.

  • Where the operating instructions do not reolve the problem, Rackspace are instructed to contact the Technical Operations team bytelephone any time day or night for further instructions

  • We have our own monitoring in place, independent of the Rackspace monitoring which notifies our Technical Operations team of any system being unavailable.

Our priority and focus has always been to provide a high availability, resilient service to mitigate the need for 24/7 support. We have KPIs that we measure and achieve to ensure we do not require 24/7 support.

We provide a self help knowledge centre for the most common system queries to provide help and support outside of our service desk team office hours.