Service Level Agreements (SLA)
There is a new question that churches across the country are
beginning ask themselves: “What is our SLA to our congregation?”
Does a first time visitor get a call within one day of visiting the
church? Or is it more like a week? If someone wants to volunteer in a ministry
how long do we have to call them back and get them plugged in to a volunteer
position? One week? Two weeks?
How about a month?
How can the church improve a process if the process is not documented? How can the senior staff hold their team
accountable for making calls if there are no guidelines?
While working with a church staff, I asked, “Ok, who handles
the calls to first time visitors”. The
response I received was more like a Seinfield episode than you might
expect. Each person pointed at someone
else, and said he / she makes the calls.
It was during that meeting that they realized there was no documentation
for their process. One pastor asked “Are
we even calling people?” No one could
answer with 100% certainty.
When you start monitoring contact items and find contacts
that have gone untouched for two weeks or longer, what should you do? If asked, the staff person responsible will
probably reply, “I was getting to that contact”. Because of a failure to identify your churches’
SLA, you now have nothing to say but, “umm, OK”. If the SLA
is one week then you can say, “Our commitment level to first time visitor
contacts is one week. Is that time frame
too short?” Are you understaffed and
unable to meet our current goal for contacting first time guests in one
week? Are there any key volunteers that
you can get to help you make these calls?
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Can you fix a process that isn’t documented
and adhered to it?”
Jeff
Hook, CEO Fellowship Technologies
Intelligent Routing
One thing we briefly discussed last week is that the person
getting the contacts initially, quite possibly, isn’t the person responsible
for making the calls.
“Pastor Ricardo” isn’t always the right person to make the
call to a visiting family. Often, the
first time visitor is a teen, in that case, the youth pastor is going to make a
real connection and get that teen plugged into church. If the family has 6 kids all under the age of
10, the children’s pastor is the best person to make the call. If the head of household mentions on the
guest registry card that he works at IBM, maybe a key volunteer that works at
IBM should make the first time visitor call.
The key is to make the best possible connection with the limited amount
of time you have. “Pastor Ricardo” or
possibly Mary (who knows something about everyone in the church) should be
responsible for receiving first time visitor contacts and then routing those
contacts to the best possible call person.
Other issues that Mary or “Pastor Ricardo” can take into consideration
are staff vacations and current work loads.
If the youth pastor is currently working 50 contacts and will be on
vacation next week, the decision can be made as to whom youth contacts should
be routed.
The most important thing that I want you to take away from
this one sided discussion is that God has put people in contact with your
church and how you handle that person can have eternal consequences. Why take chances with shoddy processes or bad
practices because you have always done it that way. Now is the time to evaluate, measure, and
change for the better.