Formulating Service Level Agreements through Request Metrics

Globalization, along with wider and new range of products, has resulted to an increasingly intense competition. In order for businesses to keep up with competitors, they have to have access to specialist skills to reduce cost of production, maintain applications, and many others. It is no wonder that along with these developments come the mushrooming of support service providers offering various services to companies. Their support metrics must be adaptive to clients’ needs, but they can simply request metrics from clients to formulate a scorecard that fits the bill.

Prominent among outsourcing service support providers are call centers, which handle customer support service, application developers, maintenance experts, and helpdesk consultancies to relieve companies of certain jobs and allow them to focus on the essentials of their operations.

Outsourcing companies, like other organizations, make use of scorecards to ensure a kind of management that will bring in more clients while satisfying the needs of its own people. When it comes to establishing effective scorecards or metrics, service support providers are in a more complex situation than others, as they have to set up scorecards that are flexible enough to accommodate the demands of a client. Thus, their metrics, for example, for personnel performance and development must match the demands and needs of the market.

In most instances, an outsourcing agreement between a service support provider and a client would last years. Early on, the service provider and client would agree on terms and conditions that will govern the contract. This is very important to the healthy working relationship between the two parties. This agreement, known as the Service Level Agreement (SLA), establishes the scorecards by which the relationship is measured as to whether it is working or not.

The assessment of whether the relationship is working or not is heavily dependent on the specific details of the SLA agreement itself. The agreement must be detailed enough to make it easier for both parties to decide if parties are meeting their obligations set forth in the SLA. Ideally, the SLA should define targets and obligations of both parties, the limits of the services, including task delegation issues and quality of services the client expects from the service provider.

Since the metrics that the SLA establishes is a joint effort between contracting parties, this protects the service provider from arbitrary decisions of the client that may make the relationship unworkable or may prove disadvantageous to the service provider.

When a service provider is committed to an existing SLA, it is obvious that the measures contained in SLA become its scorecards, at least for the duration of the agreement. Of course, when a provider has a few clients, then it operates under several scorecards. Such conditions demand that service providers develop flexible yet highly responsive management scorecards, especially those concerned with human resources development.

Service providers, however, have the benefit of being able to learn from working under different conditions. This must make the formulation of SLAs that fits its own dynamics relatively simple. All they have to do is request metrics that a potential client prefers, and work from there. Overall, however, it will not do to just keep on performing the LSA-based scorecards, as sooner or later, stagnation sets in. What service providers need is a scorecard able to adapt to changing business conditions; thus, it must always be focused on human resources development. After all, companies that engage in outsourcing expect a high level of performance from service providers.

If you are interested in Request Metrics, check this web-site to learn more about request metric.