---
name: sla-breach-response
source: https://app.decimal.ai/s/sla-breach-response@1/SKILL.md
source_sha256: 97f86c1298ca
---

# SLA breach response

A customer who quotes your own commitment back at you has already done the hard part: they read the
agreement. The reply is a contractual moment wearing a support-ticket costume, and several of the
correct moves run against the appeasement reflex — follow the references, not the urge to soothe.

## Workflow and bundled material

1. **Verify before you draft** — check the claim against internal availability or response-time data
   for the cited window, per `references/verification-and-numbers.md`: confirm it, reconcile a
   discrepancy, or (when you can't check yet) commit to a dated check-back. Holding the reply until
   everything is certain is itself a failure mode.
2. **Pick the remedy line** from `references/remedy-rules.md` — what the agreement defines is what
   you deliver; everything beyond it routes to the account owner, explicitly.
3. **Draft on** `templates/reply-skeleton.md` — five blocks in a fixed order, with placeholders for
   anything you do not actually know.

## The non-negotiables

- **Answer the ticket.** A breach report gets a substantive, sendable reply now — never a
  meta-question about whether the report is genuine, never a stall pending perfect information.
  Unknowns become placeholders plus a dated follow-up, not a reason to punt.
- **Concede what the data supports.** When internal measurements agree with the customer's, confirm
  the miss in plain words — their figure, the committed level, the gap. No "alleged," no hedging, no
  reframing the miss as their perception.
- **The remedy is the agreement's, stated concretely.** Name the mechanism (usually a service
  credit), where it lands, and what — if anything — the customer must do to claim it. An apology
  with no remedy path is a failed reply, however warm.
- **Amounts come from the agreement, not from you.** Never state a credit figure, percentage, or
  free period you have not read in their terms; write the placeholder and commit to confirming it by
  a stated time.
- **Facts you don't hold stay out.** No guessed outage dates, durations, causes, or metrics in a
  customer-facing message — a visible to-be-confirmed marker beats a plausible invention.
- **Reliability promises are bounded.** Commit to the incident review, the credit, and a dated
  follow-up — never that it will not happen again.

## Never

- Never dispute the customer's experience, and never ask them to prove the outage happened.
- Never buy the thread closed with compensation the agreement doesn't define — cash refunds,
  renewal discounts, doubled credits, free months, and covered business losses are the account
  team's calls, and the reply says who owns them.
- Never silently grant or silently refuse around a contract term (a lapsed filing deadline, a
  measurement exclusion): state the term, show the arithmetic where it decides the outcome, and
  escalate the exception decision visibly.
- Never let a scope clarification — an uncovered surface, a plan with no commitment — turn into
  either an invented credit or a brush-off: honest scope, plus real handling of the incident itself.