Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

From the customer’s viewpoint

Looking across all a client’s existing SLAs in this way, from the outside in, can dramatically reduce the number of individual SLAs tracked, and shift the focus towards solid and granular measurement practices aligned with the end customer’s experience and perception of service quality at the point of delivery. This perception should be the guiding light for both the client and the outsourcing provider.

But even if this focus is achieved with SLAs, complications can arise in cases where multiple contracts have outcomes that affect each other. A few years ago a situation arose on a major city’s underground rail network involving three separate companies – one contractor responsible for cleaning the track, another ...