Introducing Provider Reports and Customer Reports
Two new sections have become available in the Analytics console. They are called ‘Provider Reports’ and ‘Customer Reports’. Each section is a dashboard that provides real-time information about service quality. The first provides information about the quality of service that an organization receives from its providers; the second about the quality of service it delivers to its customers.
The ‘Provider Reports’ dashboard lists all of the internal and external service providers that the organization relies on. If there are any SLA violations, this dashboard shows a red dot next to the provider’s name. The trend column uses 12 red or green blocks for each provider to show whether any of them violated any of their SLA targets over the passed 12 months.
When one of the provider organizations is selected, its report for the current month is presented to the right of the list of providers. The report shows how many SLAs are in place with this provider, how many requests were assigned to the provider in the current month, how many are still open, and how many were completed by the provider this month.
Apart from coldly measuring the provider’s performance against its SLA targets, the report also shows how satisfied the requesters were with the support they received for the provider’s services. Any feedback received in the current month concerning completed requests that the provider was involved with is presented in the Customer Satisfaction section of the report.
The last section of the report lists each service that is obtained from the provider. In this section, a service is marked with a red dot when any of the targets of the SLAs for this service have been violations. In addition, if there was a service outage, the days of the month during which the service was down are marked with small red blocks. The total outage duration during the current month is also displayed for each service.
A previous month’s report can be obtained by clicking on the month’s name in the upper right and selecting a different month.
Clicking on one of the services opens a list of all SLA reports for that service for the selected month. Again, all this is real-time information. From these SLA reports, it is possible to drill down further into the affected requests and underpinning SLAs.
The ‘Provider Reports’ dashboard is specifically designed to support SIAM’s service integrator role. It provides the information needed to make this role successful; not just on a day-to-day operational level, but also for the periodic evaluation of each provider, as well as for the more strategic discussions about whether a specific service should be in- or outsourced.
The ‘Customer Reports’ dashboard works in much the same way. It lists all of the internal and external customers of the organization. It makes it easy for a service provider organization (such as an internal IT department or a managed service provider) to see how well they are performing for each of the organizations that rely on them.
Losing a customer typically represents a major financial impact for a service provider. Being able to monitor the quality of service for each customer in real time should help service provider organizations respond quickly to any violations and avoid the loss of customers.