It is natural to focus on service levels (SLA’s). They can ensure a certain quality and timeliness of services delivered. We take care to identify metrics that are important indicators to assure a certain standard. However, they are not a panacea and need to be considered as one of the tools in the toolbox. Suppliers also monitor SLA commitments naturally. And sometimes they pay more attention to meeting service levels than their client counterpart. In addition to managing client expectations, they also have to align with their internal review processes. Missing certain SLA’s can trigger internal flags and impact performance assessments. During SLA review meetings and discussions, there could be multiple considerations or concerns supplier account managers need to take into account.
In other words, service level results impact the supplier account team in several ways, 1) how the account is measured internally and 2) how they are perceived in the market generally and 3) in interactions with the client. This, in turn, impact behaviors and drives a desire to review any misses and a determination to ensure that the SLA scorecard is green.
Case in point, during a call with a senior executive from a supplier he stated that his goal was for all SLA results to be at 100%, i.e. not just met, but everything meeting all the time. Of course, this is an impossible task and the financials associated with the deal did not allow for the excessive staffing such an endeavor would require, assuming results are reported without being “edited”. More concerning is that such objectives often have undesired consequences resulting in an over-focus on service level results driving account manager to look for exceptions with the hope that results can be turned from red to green by (manually) adjusting SLA calculations. This shifts the focus from delivering a quality service and achieving customer satisfaction to reporting green. The outcome is what is often referred to as the watermelon effect, i.e. green on the outside hiding the red inside the cover. A much better outcome is to be transparent about challenges and issues and work collaboratively to resolve them versus pretending none exists.
Such practices tend to happen in an informal way, often leveraging personal relationships that are established between suppliers and their client counterparts. When agreements are signed, new norms are established, sometimes by design and sometimes you find out later. As an example, we had a situation where a pre-SLA review between the supplier account manager and his client counterpart was established as a monthly occurrence before the SLA results were released to the supplier governance team. The (unwritten) agenda for these meetings was to review tickets that did not meet the SLA criteria. Any missed ticket that may have had a mitigating circumstance was challenged and either removed from the calculation or changed to met. Each manual adjustment was approved. From this point of view, it was a controlled process. However, it wasn’t transparent, and it was subjective. The comprehensive governance process did not include this step. The result of the activity was that all SLA results reported green. Unfortunately, this practice meant that we did not get the information we needed to understand quality and performance issues associated with service delivery and, as a result, we did not proactively address customer satisfaction challenges.
Of course, there can be tremendous value in reviewing tickets / tasks / transactions that miss service level expectations. They provide insights into any service issues, knowledge challenges, individual performance or staffing issues. They can also pinpoint hand-off misses between teams and/or suppliers. In this way, transparent conversations and troubleshooting can be more pro-active in addressing areas of concern.
This is possible when the collaboration is strong with a high degree of trust. It is important to establish a culture where it is “okay” to miss a service level. It is okay because both parties will take it seriously and collaborate as necessary to ensure that required actions are taken to mitigate and prevent repeat issues.
