More than half of Buzz respondents were concerned that service level agreements used to monitor the performance of third-party administrators focused too heavily on response times. But a quarter of contributors were happy with how SLAs were used.
Many contributors said accuracy was more important than timeliness, and one respondent said this accuracy was "woefully lacking at present". Others called for simplicity of communications and member experience to be measured.
"A balanced scorecard approach is much more valid for assessing overall service delivery," suggested one respondent. "It is preferable to include a penalty and reward agreement."
One commentator said TPA contracts were always a trade-off between cost quality and delivery. As it is generally difficult for trustees to assess quality when reviewing tenders, they said time and cost tended to be the decisive factors.
"If you want time-bound responses, or measures that drive unhelpful behaviours rather than a quality response then feel free to continue to use a blunt instrument of SLAs driven by time," said one exasperated respondent. "Surely in this day and age we should finally embrace output-based measures which encourage the right behaviours and are focussed on delivering a high quality service."
This contributor said the Pensions Administration Standards Association was on the right track with its pilot accreditation scheme, as was The Pensions Regulator.
"All that leaves is the clients to redouble their efforts to move away from time based measures and focus on what's important!" they said.
But some respondents warned that taking the focus off response times could lead to standards slipping.
"Turnaround times are important and need to comply with statutory obligations and therefore are not optional," said one.
