The customer wants SLAs
Oh, what do I do now?
I have no idea how to deliver them
Oh, what do I do now???
....Don't worry, that's the only rhyme in this post
Its true, though. Entitlements, if you have them, can be tough to manage. If you don't have them however, you may be missing out on new ways to get closer to your customer and make money. Lets talk a bit about what Entitlements are and why they may be essential to your business.
An Entitlement, Service Level (SL), Service Guarantee, SLA (SL Agreement), SLG (SL Guarantee), SLO (SL Objective) — call it what name you want, is essentially a promise you are making your customers (internal or external) that essentially says that when something happens, you will do something about it, in a given amount of time. In other words, it's the service level they are "entitled" to when they purchase something from you.
If you don't meet those entitlements, and if you pay financial penalties for not doing it, what you have with your customer is usually defined as a SLA (Service Level Agreement). If there is no financial or other penalty associated with missing your promise, then you have a SLO (Service Level Objective).
Its been proven for a while now, that customers no longer make buying decision primarily on product or cost. They are making decisions based on customer service. Yes, that's right, you may have the best product in your space, you may even have the lowest price in your space — customers will still make buying decisions based on the service levels they receive. Smart businesses are recognizing that, they are also recognizing that giving good service need not be a cost, but can actually be monetized. Really? How? Well, read on.
The one size fits all service days are gone. Customers are willing to pay more for better and differentiated service. E.g. customers will pay more to have a turnaround time to critical issues of 4 hours versus 24 hours. There is money to be made here, and a chance to make customers happier. Plus you will keep their business. Win win win.
Which then brings us to managing these service levels. Why is that even important? Can we just not "do our best"? No you cannot. Managing service levels is absolutely critical for the following five reasons:
- First off, if you miss your SLAs, you will incur a financial penalty for missing those (duh!!). And make unhappy customers who may leave you.
- If, today, you are not incurring financial penalties AND not managing your service levels pragmatically, you are likely over-serving those customers (resulting in higher costs than you need to spend).
- If you teams do not have visibility to which customer is entitled to what SLA, they will likely (as my team did) manage to the SLA spec for ALL of your customers (because they don't know who is entitled / not entitled and they don't want to risk any financial penalties)— again increasing the cost of service — sometimes significantly (think overtime, headcount, equipment etc. etc.).
- If you only offer SLOs and do not differentiate on your service, sooner or later, your competition will do that and start taking away your business from you. Trust me, its happened to me.
- And finally, silver bullet here, you may be missing an opportunity to monetize and make some money through differentiated service.
So how do you manage entitlements? Well, meet technology. Most of the good Customer Service Management software available today take that burden away from you. They allow you to manage your service entitlements in a very mature, proactive and effortless (very important for your users) way. They give visibility into what entitlement which customer, customer asset or customer location is entitled to, and allow your users to quickly and visually know what's the next expected milestone and how much time they have to complete it. They also allow users and managers to proactively manage tickets that are getting close to missing milestones, through escalations, notifications and other mechanisms. If your process involves multiple parallel tasks — you can even put an OLA on each individual task and measure your internal teams' performance. And finally they are easy to use, set up, report on and customize for your different customers. Entitlement nirvana, here we come!
So whether you have simple gold, silver, bronze service levels, or something that's custom to each customer. Whether you just have or want SLOs for your internal teams (so that work does not go to a black hole to die) — no matter what, use technology that's available today to solve your issues and put the sexy back in your service levels. Not only will it do wonders for your company and customers, it may even entitle (get it??) you to a nice bump in your career and make you a customer service hero! Now that's entitlement!!!
