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

SLAs: meaningful outputs

Whatever the availability of benchmarks, service levels and measurement should focus on factors with real business impact. Earlier in this book we described the experience of the Ireland-based mortgage lender First Active, which set out with a clear objective of delivering each mortgage decision within one working day.

It is not often that a client company can identify a single objective as clearly as this. As a simple, overarching, agreed and clearly articulated business target that can drive transformation all the way though to the setting of KPIs and SLAs, First Active’s objective represents something of an ideal. This is partly because it is a benchmark that looks not at what goes into the process, but at what comes ...