Implementing Dynamic IT B2B Infrastructure: Why Real-Time Service Level Monitoring is Essential for Delivery
As sourcing deals become smaller and more frequent, it becomes increasingly difficult to track and report on service levels. Recently, I was talking to a customer who said that service level reporting isn’t good enough for delivering great service to their customers, they require service level monitoring. I believe that the direction of IT Service Management and SLA Governance is heading increasingly in this direction of real-time service level monitoring and eventually into the domain of predictive analysis but I’ll save that for a future post.
Why I think that Real-Time Service Level Monitoring is Essential?
Please consider the following two examples:
We have found that a typical service case that is managed by Swivel Chair, that is without B2B integration between the different systems of service customers and service providers, is updated an average of 2.2 times per ticket and of these cases, 7% of are escalated. This along with the errors associated with manual processes can adversely affect your Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) which can leave you with dissatisfied customers.
When providers integrate B2B service processes with their service customers and all ticket updates for resolution processes are pushed automatically to the customers’ existing systems, that on average, a service case is then updated 7.3 times and out of these cases, only 1.5% are escalated. This is significant considering that when a customer has control over their service case and is able monitor and update information in real-time, that they are not only happier with the result but they also save your support organization time which allows them to perform their job much more quickly to reduce MTTR. The same applies for organizations having shared service processes with different service partners – they can collaborate easily and efficiently to resolve a service case.
Swivel Chair vs. B2B Integration
The benefits of integration via a central hub are clear:
- Increased Customer Satisfaction
- Performance Optimization (fewer escalations through early detection)
- Reduced MTTR (up to 25%)
Qualitatively, this is significant if but let’s also consider that the costs associated with escalation. As a quick example, let’s assume that you manage 1000 tickets/month and that the average cost of escalation is $1,800 USD. When we apply the escalation rates above, integration results in cost savings of 79%!
IT in real-time; saves time, money and satisfied customers. If you’d like more information, I’d invite you to download one of our whitepapers.
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