This week at SMB Nation we had a great presentation on SLAM - Service Level Agreement Management - the very concept that your customer pays against a measured scale for a particular level of service. It gives comfort and understanding to an area that can sometimes be seen as confrontational. (Matt's co web site can be found at http://www.axxis.com.
Not only was it discussed at SMBNation in Amsterdam, but the register has also posted an article on how it can breed trust too - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/31/marrying_it_and_business/. Now I am not one to trust anything the register prints, but it does point out how SLAs can be used to regain trust and understanding in difficult time.
For info on the SLAs being discussed at SMBNation, you can also look at coming to the London, Birmingham or Thames Valley Partner Group meetings over the next 3 days. More details on these can be found at www.sbsbpi.co.uk which is run by Susanne who also blogs on this site (http://uksbsguy.com/blogs/susanne_dansey/default.aspx).
Please let me know your experiences with SLAs here.
ttfn
David
(c)David Overton 2006-23