You are probably somewhat familiar with the concept of a “service-level agreement,” which give you some idea of what kind of response you can expect from a service organization. For call centers/customer service organizations, service level agreements are really a “must have.” However, if you are the manager of a department in an organization—ANY department, and ANY organization—you too have customers, even if they are internal customers, and you should look into creating a “service-level agreement” for them.
For the uninitiated, a “service-level agreement” (or SLA) is a set of expectations that are published by an organization to help their customers understand how and when they can expect to receive help. For example, a call center might guarantee its customers that when they call in for assistance, they can expect to get their call answered within five minutes. If the call is not answered in five minutes, your SLA might state that they can expect to be able to leave a message and get their call returned within one hour. The SLA usually also sets out clearly what the method is for escalation if this SLA is not met. A strong SLA gives your customers comfort in knowing that, during times when they need you the most, they know ahead of time what to expect and can plan their own business accordingly.
As I mentioned earlier, every department in an organization ought to adopt and publish an SLA. The most important reason for this is that proactively producing and publishing an SLA gives you the opportunity to set the expectations of your own customers, which means YOU get to help define what “good” is! For example, if you work in the contracts department of a software firm, your “customers” are the company’s account executives who need you to draft/approve contracts for their prospective new clients.
People are going to have different ideas of how soon your department ought to be turning these contracts around and will become disgruntled with you if you don’t meet their expectations. However—if you proactively issue an SLA that outlines what they can expect (and it is a reasonable timeframe based on past history), then you have effectively “set the bar” for how good can be defined. With no SLA in place, a forty-eight-hour turnaround on a contract might be unacceptable. However, with an SLA in place that states that clients can expect a contract request to be completed and returned within three business days, then if you actually produce it in forty-eight hours, you are now “early”! You gotta love that …
