Why SLAs don’t always align with business priorities

SLAs are two-way accountability for customer service. They can be internal between departments or entities or between business and external service providers.

Most service providers have standard SLAs and sometimes several, reflecting various levels of service at different prices that can be a good starting point for negotiation for a particular service or product.

Despite the continuous changes in the business environment, SLAs rarely seem to change or evolve at the same pace the business does and this is the reason why they don’t align with business priorities. In fact, more often than not, SLAs are always inherited. What is happening in most organizations is that an SLA that was drafted years ago, at a point of purchase of a solution, or service is still honored today simply because it’s there. There is little flexibility in reporting unique circumstances influencing SLA attainment and management e.g. the time taken for a customer/service provider to respond to you, right to audit, defect rates, technical quality, Security and privacy, production failures, service availability, and a penalty for not meeting set metrics, etc. most SLAs don’t account for such provisions. We need to change the game!

Below are tips for taking SLAs to a whole new level of ease and effectiveness by communicating more effectively with third parties to manage SLAs and minimize service disruptions.

• Set a baseline: The best place to start is by looking at your current SLAs, and how you’re performing against them. Take an inventory of what you offer, and how it aligns with the business needs of your company and your customers. For this to be successful, SLAs need the blessing of your IT leaders, and the leaders of your customer organizations, too. Start by getting your own management to buy in, and then ask them to help you negotiate with your customer’s management team.
• Make no assumptions: Ensure you understand the clauses, for example; if the service provider is acquired by or merges with another company, the customer may expect that its SLA will continue to be in force, but this may not be the fact. The agreement may have to be renegotiated however, bear in mind that the new owner will not want to alienate existing customers, so may decide to honor existing SLAs. Be clear with this so that you incorporate business process metrics into the SLAs. Using existing key performance indicators is typically the best approach as long as the vendor’s / suppliers' contribution to those KPIs can be calculated.
• Break up large, complex SLAs: Rather than creating complex SLAs use a series of smaller ones, so you can measure and report on the individual pieces of your workflow, not just the entire pie. This also makes it easier to update your SLAs and keep them current.
• Use simple, clear naming conventions: stakeholders should be able to read the name of the SLA and quickly understand what they’re being measured on. It’s also important to resist the urge to create too many goals. The more goals you create, and the more variables you introduce into each goal, the harder they become to understand and adhere to.
• Create an SLA that stops tracking time to resolution while you’re waiting for a customer to reply. IT departments need to be able to measure their own response times effectively in order to provide the best possible service. Still, measuring SLAs gets complicated quickly as slow-responding customers and third-party escalations cause response times to look far worse than they may actually be. Make sure your measurement and reporting systems can accommodate exceptions like these, so the service desk team is tracked based on how they are actually performing.
• Set different performance goals based on ticket priority levels: You need flexibility from your service desk software so you can create SLA performance goals based on just about any combination of parameters you define. It’s important to be able to change or edit them easily to keep your team’s priorities completely aligned with changing business needs.
• Keep some SLAs running 24/7, and restrict others to normal business hours

Remarks

Sometimes you need another line of defense to achieve your business goals therefore, SLAs should be reviewed and modified by the customer and legal team because they are usually slanted in favor of the supplier/vendor/third-party.