The SLAs That Make or Break Multi-Site Field Service Delivery

Ryan: Debbie, welcome to the show. I’m really excited to talk with you today. We like to start these chats by getting a sense of your professional journey and background. So you’re currently Director of Field Services Delivery. What does a typical day look like for you, and what are your recurring problems you’re constantly solving?

Debbie Vaughn: Well, you know, my title today is a very vague title compared to all the things I do. I oversee several departments in my current role, everything from networking and infrastructure to managed IT, lifecycle management, desktop support, mobile device management, service desk, vendor management, and staff augmentation. So every day is different, which is exactly why I got into this field.

I’m one of those weirdos that thrives in chaos. And I think that to be successful in service delivery, you need to thrive in chaos because you have to be one of those people that’s ready to walk in with a fire hose, or a parachute, every day and tackle what’s coming to you.

Now, fortunately for me, I’ve got very good leadership under me, so I don’t have to always be as in the trenches as I used to. A lot of my day now, I get to do more of the fun stuff like dealing with sales and talking about, “Hey, we want to go pitch this to our client. Do you think we can do it? What does delivery look like? How would we execute? What’s the cost of service on something like this?” So I get to do a lot more in pre-sales and more of the strategic portion, which is a lot of fun. That’s also something I have been working my whole career to get to.

I think though that in a role like mine, you’re always straddling the line between strategy and tactics, right? So just this week, I was head deep into a massive escalation at the service desk, helping my team unpack that, figure out what next steps were going to look like, partnering with the customer to get us on the right track. And then the next call was about, “Hey, can we service this new opportunity over in the UK?” So every day looks incredibly different, but that’s really why I am in this field and why I love it. If I had a day-to-day, everyday boring, I’d wither and die. It’s not my jam.

Ryan: As you mentioned there about being in a sort of sales front-end role as well, and obviously you’ve had that experience in sales and client relationship management, would you say that experience has been fundamental when it comes to handling enterprise clients and large system rollouts?

Debbie Vaughn: Oh my gosh, 100% because I’ve sat in all the seats. And what I typically say about myself is that I’m sales driven but operationally minded. Even when I was in sales, I always had that process and operations background nagging at me. My sales leaders hated it, it drove them nuts, but it’s always been who I am and part of my DNA.

Taking those nuggets from those years of experience and applying them now, I have a different perspective. And I think transparently that’s why sales leaders do enjoy working with me, because they know that I am always focused on the back end of the sale, but yet I’ll wear the operational black hat when I need to. I’ll hold that pragmatic line. I’m not afraid to say, “We can’t do this,” or, “I’m not comfortable with you presenting this to your client at this point in time. It’s not ready, but here’s what we can do.”

So I think that having the experience of sitting in the chair trying to keep the customer, sell the customer, now serve and deliver to the customer, just brings a good perspective. I jokingly tell people that my job description now is karma because I actually answer to salespeople’s promises now. So I have to execute on what they say we could do in a room. It’s kind of full circle.

Those different roles have certainly crafted me into the professional that I am and have made me a person that sales is not afraid to bring along. A lot of times, you see sales or even customer success, they don’t want operations or delivery in the room with their customer because they’re afraid of what they’re going to say. Because historically, we’re very transparent, we’re very blunt, like, “No, we can’t do that.”

But I think I’ve learned to put a finesse on it from sitting in that sales seat. The fear factor isn’t there with bringing me along. My team’s not afraid to put me in front of the customer because I will say it like it is, but I will craft it in a way that’s not so scary or blunt. Us operational leaders, we get a bad reputation. That’s why the sales and operations fight has been going on for the millennium.

Ryan: You just touched on it there, coming full circle of sales. So you’ve been part of these large IT network system rollouts and they focus heavily on SLA compliance, customer attention, etc. From your experience, what are the most important things to get right to make a multi-site rollout run smoothly?

Debbie Vaughn: I think the most important thing to get right is understanding what’s important to the customer. You can come in as the integrator or the managed services provider and think this is how it needs to be done because you’ve got the expertise. And you’re partially right. Your job is to guide the customer on what a successful rollout looks like, bring best practices to the table, and bring the milestones that must be hit.

But if you don’t take the time to partner with your customer and figure out what good looks like to them, and what’s most important, and what their users are going to face, you miss the mark. You need to understand the problem statement and why they’re implementing the product or doing the rollout, and then figure out what those success metrics look like together. There’s a difference between a vendor and a partner.

You can come in and be a vendor all day, but you may show up in a room with the CIO thinking you’re knocking it out of the park and she kicks you out because you’re dead wrong about what’s important to the customer. Creating those success metrics together at the beginning is one of the most important things.

And then the other most important thing: never take your finger off the pulse of the voice of the customer and the temperature through the whole process. Do not be afraid to highlight risk and do not be afraid to show red. That’s where I see failures. Sales does not want to show red. Well, guess what? You have to. The customer is going to call you out. They know if you walk in and say everything is on track, nothing’s at risk, there’s no yellow. They’ll call your bluff, and you lose trust. Now you’re a vendor.

There are tangible items you have to track: milestones, budget, time, fiscal targets. But there are also less tangible items that cannot be lost. Even if you come in with a sheet of red, if you’re a partner and not a vendor, you’ll work with your customer on prioritising risk, tackling the most important first, figuring out what needs to go to phase two, and what an MVP looks like. Even if you face adversity, it’s how you overcome it in partnership that determines whether at the end you’re holding your hands up together saying, “We did it,” instead of the customer saying, “Worst vendor I’ve ever had.”

Ryan: If you were thinking about what the end customer values most, how would you prioritise speed, communication, or quality? What are they seeking most out of this delivery?

Debbie Vaughn: There’s an old saying: you can have good, cheap, or fast. You can have two, you can’t have all three. So I believe they value communication first, accuracy second, and speed third. You can often explain away speed.

You can go get leniency from leaders. You can go to the board and say, “Here’s what we’re facing, here’s what happened, here’s why, here’s how we’re overcoming it.” It’s not going to be implemented by next week, we’re looking at a target date of X. But because you communicated and you have a clear statement of what’s transpired and how you’re going to overcome it, speed can be dealt with. Even when they say it can’t.

You can always find a way. There is always a way. But you need to be very clear in your communications and establish a plan.

Ryan: Communication is so key to understanding and prioritising, as you mentioned earlier.

Debbie Vaughn: And transparency. Don’t just communicate, be transparent. You don’t have to let them completely behind the curtain, they don’t have to go all the way into the sausage making, but you can’t be afraid to highlight where the issues are. More importantly, many times the issues are on the customer side. They know this. Highlight it. Say, “Here’s what we’re facing. Part of this is us, part of this is you. Now, how do we overcome this, and what does this look like going forward?” Customers know they have their own issues.

Ryan: And you’ve been involved in a lot of these conversations, I’m presuming.

Debbie Vaughn: Yes, many. I’m a good translator. I can take a super technical problem statement full of jargon that makes a C-suite glaze over and translate it into, “If I heard you correctly, we’re hitting a wall here. If we don’t overcome this, we can’t do this.” Then I can take that to the executive board and say, “Here’s the problem, here’s what we need to do, until we do this, we can’t do this.” Being able to translate down into a simple conversation is a key trait in a role like this.

Ryan: When you’re running service delivery at scale, you need a small set of signals or metrics you trust. What KPIs do you rely on to manage team and operational performance day to day?

Debbie Vaughn: The KPIs any organisation relies on: speed of response, speed of resolution (mean time to repair), did you fix it the first time, and overall uptime if you’re keeping an enterprise alive.

It’s easy to hone in on the one bad thing, but when you look at trend, volume, and scale, you realise 99% of the time you don’t have problems. People hone in on the 1%. That’s a good conversation to have in ugly QBRs. “Listen, we wouldn’t have jobs if you didn’t ever have things like this happen. If technology was perfect, we all wouldn’t have jobs.”

I like to look at overall volumes and percentages month over month or quarter over quarter. Yes, maybe there was one thing where we dropped the ball, a ticket sat for 10 days, we sent the wrong parts, everything happened. At the end, we got it fixed. This is what we did. But overall, we’re pretty good.

The other things I look at that are less tangible: voice of the customer. Every leader has walked into a QBR shining with a green metric sheet and the customer says, “Our employees hate you.” That’s when you have to balance reading the room and applying critical thinking. Sometimes you break process to hold the hand of a VIP user, even if it hurts your metric.

And employee satisfaction. Voice of the employee is just as important. We run our field teams ragged. When they’re burnt out and undervalued, that shows up when they walk into a customer site or deal with an end user, and it impacts the customer experience. Happy employees and happy customers matter, and the emotional can outweigh the black and white.

Ryan: That’s fascinating. Someone can have so many clear green metrics and still have an unhappy customer.

Debbie Vaughn: Absolutely. It happens more than you probably realise. But we’re doing good. We’re not doing bad.

Ryan: It’s industry-known that engineers burn themselves out, and field teams can feel isolated. What do you do to keep engineers connected and valued when they’re in the field?

Debbie Vaughn: It’s a trend in the industry that we put our field teams out on an island. Their job is to be on the road, hopping from site to site, job to job. We’re not great at bringing them into the fold and giving them the context and the why: where the company is headed, how their job impacts success, what the customer is saying about their work, and how they impact a project or contract.

Every employee deserves to know what good looks like in their role, how they impact it, and what the downstream impact is when they don’t do what we ask. One of the best things I did: get on the road and go see your field teams.

I did a roadshow a couple of years ago when I was running my biggest field team. I pulled them off the field for a day, got them into a conference room, met them, shook their hand, showed them the financials, explained where we were getting beat up, where we were crushing it, and why we were pushing productivity. The attitude shift was almost overnight.

Leaders get stuck behind computers and in the day-to-day, and we lose sight of the fact that these teams need connection. They need to feel part of something bigger, and understand how they impact the big picture.

For example: closure notes. Every field engineer struggles with thorough closure notes. In one contract, if closure notes weren’t done satisfactorily or in time, they wouldn’t pay. We ended up with hundreds of invoice disputes because of closure notes. When engineers understood the outcome, behaviour changed. Notes got cleaner.

My rule for all engineers is: operate under CYA. Fill out your paperwork so nobody can ever come back and question what you did and how you did it. Once we applied that principle, we saw a turnaround. Without context, engineers think you’re just being nitpicky.

Ryan: And you saw a measurable difference between before that day and after?

Debbie Vaughn: Hugely. Their job is not to do paperwork, but this was a big deal. We had taken over a team from another group and the communication of what their role would look like was messy.

Getting out in the field was the best thing I could do. It cost the company money, and we were losing money, but we couldn’t afford not to do it. We were trending the wrong way. The team was unhappy. That shows when they walk in to service a customer. You get bad behaviour and customer complaints.

It wasn’t a 100% turnaround, but the roadshow went so far. Then we asked what they wanted. They wanted town halls and all-hands meetings, not constantly, but enough to stay connected to leadership: what’s going on in the company, what’s next, anything cool coming, are they part of it, how can they help. It goes a long way, and operations and delivery leaders aren’t always great at it.

Ryan: Did that completely change your mindset on how you manage engineers?

Debbie Vaughn: 100%. I didn’t always have the reputation of being the most touchy-feely leader. I was pretty non-emotional and black and white. I learned from my mentor that you can’t stay removed. You don’t have to know everything about them, and you don’t want to be so emotionally entangled that it impacts business decisions, but you have to give the why, apply context, make them feel part of something, understand what’s important to them and what their journey looks like.

In that role, we had 300-plus engineers across the nation servicing a large contract. The volumes were high, the pace was crazy. You still have to carve time out for connection.

Now wherever I go, I apply those practices. I break down silos and foster cross-collaboration. In my current organisation, before I joined, teams were siloed in different pillars. People didn’t even know who the other teams were. We brought everyone into one main org, centralised, encouraged cross-collaboration, and created development opportunities. Those conversations happen in all-hands and town halls, and they’re important for morale, which directly impacts the customer experience.

Ryan: You’ve led hundreds of engineers and service managers across different regions. What behaviours make top-performing engineers stand out in customer-facing environments?

Debbie Vaughn: There’s a unicorn engineer: a hybrid. They don’t have to be the absolute top technical person, but they’re usually a strong tier two or low tier three, and they have great bedside manner. They know who to reach out to when something is out of their reach.

They can connect and communicate with the customer. They’re patient enough to explain, and they know their resources. Scrappier is better. The one with the “do whatever it takes” attitude wins.

I’ve seen technicians show up, a part is missing, and they leave, close the ticket, and go to the next job. The customer says, “What happened?” Sometimes it’s something that could be sourced at a local hardware store. Go get it and come back. Take the extra step. Show the customer you’re trying. Stick around, call into the service desk. That’s what stands out.

Ryan: Would you prioritise a customer-facing attitude over technical skill when hiring today?

Debbie Vaughn: It depends on the role. If I’m building a high-end resolver group working remotely, I prioritise technical expertise. But I put safeguards in place because odds are they’re not the best communicators. Don’t throw them into the customer wolf den. Give them a buffer so they can focus on being technical experts.

If I’m hiring field leads who will liaise with customer contacts on site, I prioritise communication, but I make sure they have reach-back to higher-level remote resolver groups. With technology today, you can call, use Teams, even video. The customer doesn’t need to know the technician needed support. They just need to feel confident that the person on site has it handled.

In both cases, you have to give people tools to be successful. Customer-facing engineers need reach-back, and highly technical people shouldn’t be forced into customer communication. Give both the right support.

Ryan: My role at CompareSoft has me fascinated by how tools and technology are used, implemented, and sometimes fail. Looking at your achievements, like reducing employee attrition and maintaining SLA compliance above 95%, what tools have been essential in achieving that?

Debbie Vaughn: People, process, tools. We all know this. I’m in automation, but I believe you should automate process and not automate people. A tool should be a tool to augment your processes and your people.

One of the most successful things I started doing was hosting something called an operational interlock. You operationalise the contract. People get handed a statement of work with KPIs and SLAs. An operational interlock breaks that down into workflows decided between you and the customer.

You have to understand the customer’s workflows before you can build yours to match, otherwise SLAs break. The way I did it: I flew to the customer, got in a room with stakeholders on both sides, had a whiteboard, locked us in for a day and a half, and worked through the workflows: what happens when something breaks, how it comes to us, how we respond, what systems need updates, what platforms are involved, whether we need integrations.

More important than the SLA are the underlying OLAs. If you don’t establish OLAs built to achieve the SLA, things break. If you have a four-hour resolution SLA, break it down backwards. How many minutes does the service desk have to triage? How long does the first engineer have to decide if it can be resolved or must be escalated? How long does the next level have to apply the fix?

For example, for a priority one: 15 minutes to triage, then it must be in an engineer’s hands. Engineer one has 30 minutes to determine whether they can resolve it; if not, it must go to the next level. Those OLAs are crucial. Many companies overlook them, don’t build them into platforms, and only track the overall clock. Then suddenly a tier three engineer has 15 minutes to fix something.

Also, in the operational interlock, you clarify: when does the four-hour clock start? If the customer has internal triage first, they may feel like you have no time left because it was a P1 on their side. These interlocks help define that together, build the workflow, define change management expectations, and overlap practices without forcing your process onto them. Bringing in a new provider is painful. You spend the first year stepping on each other’s toes. These interlocks went so far in preventing those conversations. I cannot recommend them enough.

Ryan: And what I love there is it started with a whiteboard.

Debbie Vaughn: Yes, and then you document it and everybody gets a copy of the run book. You make a playbook together instead of shoving your process onto them.

Ryan: Going into next year and beyond, what tech investment should service delivery teams prioritise, and what problem should it solve?

Debbie Vaughn: We’ve had the age-old battle of making resolver groups more proactive. MSPs promise proactivity, but we still live in a reactive world because of the limits of tools, alerts, and information from equipment.

I’m excited for AI applications in predictive failure analysis and more insightful alerting, giving more detail and setting resolvers up to fix issues the first time, instead of wasting a trip with the wrong parts because diagnosis is poor.

You still need a human at the end of the day to intervene. It’s a tool to augment, not replace. Don’t think you don’t need a NOC anymore because you have AI. You’ll regret it. Some companies will swing too far, mess up, swing back, and eventually we’ll meet in the middle. But if you use it to make teams better, delight clients, and make engineers’ jobs easier, that’s what I’m excited to see.

Ryan: Field service is still heavily male dominated. What has been your experience as a female leader, and what practical advice would you give to women coming up in this space?

Debbie Vaughn: That’s a difficult question because I’ve never participated in it. I know it’s a thing, but I don’t participate in it. For women in this industry, you need that attitude.

You need to command excellence around you, from your leaders, your people, and yourself. Be technical enough to be dangerous. Sit in the room and act like you’ve been there before. Lose the “sit there and be pretty” attitude. Bring something to the table. Own it, and challenge the people around you.

There is a balance. You don’t want to appear confrontational. You need finesse. But if you know your stuff and command excellence, it won’t matter what sex you are. You’ll hear, “Debbie knows this, did you ask her? Debbie should be in this room.” The stigma fades.

Good old boys clubs do exist. You learn to be savvy, manoeuvre around those walls, and still reach success. Understand what you’re working with, and get strategic around it.

Ryan: For engineers who want to become managers, or managers who want to be better leaders, what practical behaviours should they start applying today?

Debbie Vaughn: As a leader, get out there and talk. Go see your people. Get FaceTime, or at least video calls.

For engineers who want leadership: the best players don’t always make the best coaches. Look in the mirror and decide if you want to deal with the minutia of management. There’s a difference between management and leadership. You can be a leader in the field without taking a management step.

When you take management, you take on difficult responsibilities: HR, admin, paperwork, workforce optimisation, potentially reducing headcount. You need to know if you can do that.

Also, I believe in personality profiles. You don’t need to make everyone take tests, but understand different types. I use profiles like DISC, and there’s one called the GEM profile. I try to quickly understand how people are wired, how to communicate with them, what roles they’ll excel in, and how to help them apply their superpowers.

Don’t take someone who is operationally minded, black and white, and can’t see grey, and put them into customer success just because they can talk. They’ll wither. They’re a service delivery manager. Help people understand where they’ll live their best life.

I had a 95% promotion rate in one role. People came to my team to weather the storm, then we helped them find where they should go next. That’s how people got into very successful roles.

Ryan: Amazing. It feels like we’ve come full circle: openness, transparency, communication, and playing to strengths.

Debbie Vaughn: Yes. Tap into their superpower. And ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You can be 55 and I’ll still ask. You’re not learning, you’re dying. Engineers are lifelong learners. They want to learn, teach, and help. You’ve got to foster that environment, or you end up with unhappy employees and it impacts the customer experience. It’s full circle.

Ryan: Debbie, thank you so much for that chat. It’s packed with real insight and practical advice on KPIs, performance, tool adoption, and leadership. If you took something useful from this, please share the episode with a field service lead or engineer who would benefit. Debbie, thank you once again.

Debbie Vaughn: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ryan: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you on the next episode.