What Does It Take To Consistently Meet Service Level Agreements?

By Author: Mrunmayee Pandhare
Total Articles: 10
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When clients engage with a BPM vendor, they ensure that they have strong service level agreements (SLAs) in place to help them achieve their goals. Response times, quality, accuracy, error rates, meeting compliance requirements, reporting metrics, escalation metrics… You name it and clients will make sure that there are clearly defined SLAs in place in the contracts.

With all of these SLAs incorporated in the contract, the operating teams tend to become myopic about making sure that they are not over-stepping any of the SLA terms. Sometimes they even stop short of making innovative value contributions to the client, since it is not really a part of their SLA.

What does it take to move away from this watch-dog culture and really focus on making a value contribution to clients that is far more than just meeting SLAs?

We, at SLK Global have always believed in creating a strong performance driven culture across the organization. Some of these initiatives are also ingrained in our SmarTrans framework, leveraging which we are able to consistently deliver 3X value to our clients. Here are some of the things that we do regularly

• While we engage with clients and on-board their processes, we spend time to understand their business priorities. Our team leads also communicate with our operating teams to ensure that this understanding gets percolated through the teams in a manner that drives performance and incentivizes them.

• Our teams also spend time in mapping to the org culture, their expectations in terms of reporting, and the real importance of some of the SLAs that has been put in. These inputs help us uncover things which are even not communicated directly through these contracts.

• We rely heavily on internal communication within the teams to make sure that every member of the operating team knows what and how they are contributing to the client’s success. Our teams work on a single mantra ‘work like you own it’

Does this mean then, that we do not focus on meeting SLAs even when the client is asking us to do so? Of course not!

• We put in place the best in class tools and a stringent reporting framework that ensures we are able to track all the SLA reported parameters.

• We also incentivize our team and often celebrate superlative performances to continue to build on the performance culture.

Some of these initiatives, along with our powerful SmarTrans framework helps ensure that we are able to consistently not just meet SLAs but deliver far greater value to our customers. That is one of the reasons, why we truly believe that we are in the business of business transformation than just pure play business process management.