What are service level agreements? You probably understand the basics, but do you know how to master SLAs in order to help you win even more contracts and maximize service efficiency? Working with multiple commercial clients at once can put stress on your business and make managing SLAs difficult, but we’ll show you how to avoid that… If you’re equipped with the right technology, you can avoid costly fines, ensure you don’t breach SLAs and maintain great customer relationships. Altogether, it means your team can work more efficiently and maintain strong client relationships, well into the future.
Keep reading to learn everything there is to know about the challenges of managing SLAs and the tools you need to manage them efficiently.
Service level agreement monitoring, or SLA monitoring, is a valuable feature of field service software that helps businesses maintain and fulfill their contracted obligations to commercial or residential customers. Each contract comes with varying levels of service that your company is willing to provide but the parts of a contract related to SLA monitoring may include tasks like:
To note: should you fail to meet the outlined service in an agreement, there may be a penalty. An example could be a $200 fine per breach, but the severity of a penalty can vary, ranging from a fine, a percentage off the price of the next service, or even your contract being terminated.
HubSpot covers more about how to create a service level agreement and establish the right terms for your business.
SLA monitoring is important for three crucial reasons, which ultimately help field service companies establish credibility and commitment to a high-quality service experience.
You’ll find that SLAs:
As you know, trying to maximize the number of contracts your field service technicians can handle is no walk in the park. You might encounter a handful of challenges, like those below, but fortunately, they can be solved using software:
Now that you’ve seen some of the challenges that managing SLAs comes with, let’s look at the most useful features of monitoring software to tackle them.
Service level agreements are usually based on very specific time frames. Therefore, time tracking is a critical feature of SLA monitoring software.
“How long do we have to provide the service?”, and, “What time will we breach the SLA?” are common concerns for businesses like yours.
With multiple people working on jobs, tight deadlines, and stress, it’s easy for accurate timekeeping to fall by the wayside.
Without a computer system monitoring SLA countdowns for you, there’s no dedicated point of truth. Companies like yours need a single timer that you can rely on to track how long until an SLA breaches. It’s not good enough to simply rely on people to remember.
Especially when financial penalties and your company’s reputation are on the line.
Service level agreement monitoring software can provide you with the high level of accuracy you need to track SLA countdowns. With on-screen timers, any member of the office team can quickly check how long there is left to fulfill an SLA.
If the software color-codes the timer (as it does in Commusoft’s service contract management software), it can offer an easy visual to check where things stand.
Countdowns and timers make it easier to stay on top of SLAs, but nothing will always be 100% perfect and breaches are inevitable over time. This can be due to traffic, a sick technician, or other unforeseeable circumstances.
Before that happens, it’s ideal to receive a warning notification to let staff know that an SLA will soon expire.
For example: your business offers an SLA for a technician to be on-site within four hours. Imagine three hours have passed and the SLA hasn’t been fulfilled. SLA tracking software should be able to automatically notify and warn you that there is one hour until the SLA breaches.
If the SLA does breach (i.e. the technician arrived later than four hours), your operations director will want to be notified.
Service level agreement tracking software can provide instant notifications when an SLA is breached. So everyone is kept in the loop regarding business performance.
Similarly, you may want to send an automated email out when the SLA breaches. These can also be sent to customers, and are a good opportunity to be transparent. Use this email to acknowledge the breach and address any next steps, or follow up with any contracted requirements.
If your trades business wants to upgrade service level agreement monitoring and reporting, automatic notifications and warnings are must-haves.
Instant notifications let the operations managers know when SLAs breach. But what if they want to know how many SLAs were met (or not met) in the past six months?
That’s where reporting and analytics come in.
As you know, accurate reporting provides valuable insights into your business. For example, dedicated reporting can reveal if your team struggles with navigation. Or if there are scheduling conflicts that are affecting your team’s ability to arrive at jobs on time.
If you work for commercial clients (or would like to), they may ask for your SLA compliance, or attainment, rate. If you’re recording SLAs with a spreadsheet, attainment may be difficult to accurately track.
With records on every SLA, your team will always be aware of what’s going on. SLA reports allow staff to look back on breached SLAs and assess what could have been done differently to achieve a better outcome.
Knowing your SLA numbers will place you in a healthy position for future contract negotiations. Whether working with repeat, or new business, you can prove what your team is capable of achieving.
Inflexible management software can sometimes cause more problems than it’s worth…
When selecting software to monitor service level agreements, pick a solution that’s customizable to your needs.
Ask these questions when looking for an SLA monitoring tool:
Segmentation is a great example of a customization that improves user experience. This will help you tailor service-level agreement monitoring to your business.
Not every job you do for a client will receive the same SLA. Some jobs may have no SLA at all. With segmentation, the system can automatically control which jobs are assigned to which SLAs.
By doing this, you can ensure that when a matching job is created, the SLA will be applied without the team having to manually add it themselves.
Customizations like contract templates (which can include SLAs) are more tools that can help quickly get new accounts set up with service level agreement tracking.
It may seem obvious, but you need to be able to track the different types of SLAs that your business offers.
SLA monitoring software will likely have different SLA metrics hardcoded into them. And some won’t allow you to create your own. The question is, do they have the ones you need?
It needs to be able to measure the start action, the completion action, and the time between. If you offer complicated and specific SLAs, there may not be software that can properly measure them for you.
There are, however, several standard SLAs to look out for – time to schedule a job, time for technician on site, time for completion
If the solution you are currently using only offers some of these metrics, it may be worth looking for a more comprehensive software, like Commusoft, for all your service level agreement monitoring and reporting needs.
When you have service contract management software fully implemented, you’ll notice the difference immediately.
From increased team efficiency to improved client satisfaction, there’s an endless number of ways the field service management software can take your business to the next level.
Expanding your client base and maximizing recurring revenue is one of the best ways to grow your business and take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.
When I'm not writing about the best digital solutions for trades businesses, I'm either playing with my three dogs, or baking sweet treats!
