When people think of Service Level Agreements, they usually think of software uptime—99.9% availability, maximum downtime minutes, etc.
But what about the non-technology vendors?
Your customer support vendor promises a 2-minute average response time. Your IT services provider guarantees same-day ticket resolution for critical issues. Your help desk commits to 90% first-call resolution rates.
These SLAs can be just as important as software uptime — they’re performance commitments that directly impact your business — but they've been much more difficult to track systematically. Until now.
Here's the reality: while your SaaS vendors have automatic uptime monitoring, many of your other critical vendors—customer support teams, IT service providers, help desk operations—make promises that go beyond just keeping systems online. They commit to response times, resolution speeds, and customer satisfaction scores.
These vendors make commitments in your contracts, but tracking their performance has meant manual data collection through emails, phone calls, quarterly business reviews, and spreadsheets. It's time-consuming, inconsistent, and easy to let slip until you're in the middle of a renewal conversation with nothing but gut feelings to go on.
And even when vendors are technically meeting their SLAs, you might not realize they're just barely clearing the bar—hitting 90% when they promised 90%, rather than exceeding expectations. Without consistent data collection, you can't see the patterns. You can't tell if performance is trending downward. You can't distinguish between a vendor who's truly excelling and one who's doing the bare minimum.
Clarative's new Custom Vendor-Reported SLA feature transforms how you monitor vendor performance across any metric that matters to your business. Here's how it works:
Create custom SLAs for any non-uptime promise your vendors make. Whether it's customer satisfaction rates, average handling time, first-response speed, or any other KPI, you can track it in Clarative.
For each SLA, define two thresholds:
This dual-threshold approach gives you nuanced visibility into vendor performance—not just pass/fail, but how well they're truly delivering.
Once you've configured your SLA, Clarative automatically generates a recurring survey tailored to collect the specific metrics you need. Send these surveys to your vendors on whatever cadence makes sense—monthly, quarterly, or any custom schedule.
As vendors respond to surveys, their data flows directly into Clarative's reporting engine. You'll see performance trends, identify patterns, and spot issues before they become problems. All vendor-reported SLA data integrates seamlessly with our existing vendor reports.
The flexibility of Custom Vendor-Reported SLAs means they work across industries and use cases:
Uptime will always matter, but it's never been the whole story. With custom Vendor-Reported SLAs, you can finally hold vendors accountable to every promise they make—not just the ones that are easiest to measure.
Ready to start tracking what really matters? Log in to Clarative today and set up your first Custom Vendor-Reported SLA.
