Member Article

Service level agreement measurement must be modernised

Today, Service level agreement (SLA) measurement is allegedly designed to determine service quality and customer satisfaction. It`s also fair to say that attainment of SLA provides no guarantee of client retention as pressures always challenge the balance between cost and quality.

I believe traditional SLA measurement fails all involved parties and is currently unfit for purpose. It ignores its stated objectives simply by its design and drives inefficiency through fear of perceived failure, using an inadequate measuring tool which actually accepts failure.

It’s a blanket cover designed to catch all, but targets none. An outdated tool; a remnant of a failing supply chain created in the days of gluttony.

In building these siloed, costly and inefficient supply chains, it`s no wonder SLAs to measure this inefficiency also inherently suffer the same inadequacy.

Time for change

Like all concepts, traditionalist resistance will be ferocious, but inevitably futile. The current system is not fit for purpose and I challenge anyone to demonstrate it is.

The first mistake in any SLA agreement is acceptance of built in failure by both the client and maintenance provider. From a client prospective, I remain perplexed that IT directors and managers sign up to service contracts accepting failure as the norm.

The solution is therefore to offer an individual store by store SLA solution which targets 100 per cent success.

The Solution

Each store decides the severity of the product failure on-site at the time of failure using an agreed framework criteria and requests the response depending on the store’s requirement. This service seeks to deliver a targeted SLA which is measured by individual store needs rather than a standard set of failure criteria decided on an arbitrary basis by a central bureaucracy.

At Centrex, we receive the call and contact the store directly to establish the SLA required.

This allows us to target its infrastructure resources specifically and filters the work and response levels based on actual need not pre-determined assumptions.

Each store’s experience of the service delivery is measured, providing a meaningful SLA that reflects the true perception and effectiveness of the service measured by the stores for the customer, driving an accurate and real time SLA measurement.

Today, clients pay for these inefficient supply chains with poor service and mitigations galore. It’s time for change.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mike Heslop .