I’ve been reading Rework by the founders of 37signals. It’s an interesting book as it resonates well with the way we run mediaburst, and I can fully recommend it.
The book constitutes a number of short essays containing their advice on how to run a business.
Anyway, here’s our essay on service levels:
Punish Poor Service
We recently had a situation where one of our suppliers was processing messages slowly. We are talking about a small percentage of our Bulk SMS traffic running up to a few minutes too slow.
For us this is not acceptable. The messages our clients send can be time critical. Imagine someone staring at their phone, waiting to receive an SMS before they can get on with the task. Anything more than a handful of seconds is not acceptable.
We need to report this situation to our supplier and get it sorted quickly.
On referring to their Service Level Agreement it would appear a slow platform has a low priority assigned to it. It means when we report the issue they will “initially respond” within 24 hours and “aim to fix it” in 3 days.
This level of non-service is almost industry standard, it’s certainly replicated across our other major suppliers.
We can’t operate like this, we can’t wait 24 hours for an initial response. We can’t wait 3 days for them to resolve the problem, we have customers to serve.
You’ve got to take control of the situation, so here’s what we do now:
If we see any sign of an issue with a supplier or their SMS routes we switch them off instantly. No discussion, no phone calls. Just switch all the traffic to an alternate supplier. Job done.
It means our number one priority (our customers) is attended to. It means we continue to deliver all our messages in the rapid timeframe they are used to.
We then report the issue to the supplier and inform them as soon as they get it sorted we’ll switch them back on.
It means while they are reviewing the issue, initially responding and trying and fix the problem they are losing money. That should help focus their minds.
So it doesn’t matter what your supplier SLA’s are, take control, implement your own.