Sunday 13 January 2008

Service Quality

Like the rest of the Professional Services here, we have a Service Level Agreement with the University which is agreed with, and monitored by a Service Quality Team (SQT). Ours is chaired by Professor Sheila Corrall from Information Studies, and met last Friday afternoon. We discussed a number of things that have affected the level of service we've provided in the last six months including the various power outages (planned and unplanned) and the budget cuts we've had to cope with this year. We also looked at the results of the student survey and our action plan.

As well as approving any changes to the SLA, the SQT also looks at the service measures, and whether we've met them or not. For example, do we deliver all of our print jobs to agreed timescales? Do we check all helpdesk emails within 30 minutes? Do we achieve an up time of 99.98% for the network? If we don't achieve our service level by more than a 5% margin, or for two consecutive semesters, then this is reported to the SQT, and I have to explain why. Sometimes there are exceptional reasons, sometimes the numbers are so small as to be meaningless, and sometimes we have dependencies on other areas or departments. Our figures are pretty good, and we hit most of them. Some we don't do so good at and we are looking at how we can make changes to our working practices to achieve them. We also discussed putting the results on our web pages so that our customers can see how we're doing, and this is something I'll be raising with our Customer Services team - I think it's a good idea, but would be interested to hear your views.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"We also discussed putting the [SLA] results on our web pages so that our customers can see how we're doing, and this is something I'll be raising with our Customer Services team - I think it's a good idea, but would be interested to hear your views."

Yes, I believe that it would indeed be a good idea to publish our Service Level Agreement results for all interested parties to see.