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.

1. 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.

1. 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.