Monitoring the performance of your suppliers is key, but it can easily be neglected. When performance monitoring is undertaken, the purpose is firstly to ensure the supplier is meeting the performance criteria (service level agreements as laid down in the contract) and secondly to identify possible improvements.

It is important to hold regular review meetings where both parties seek to understand how they can make the contract perform better and to deal with problems as and when they arise. The key is to address problems when they are still minor and therefore easier to resolve.

At the beginning of any deal, set up service level agreements (SLA) – these will have key performance indicators (KPIs) as measurements. Some of the subjects that should be included are telephone answering, savings achieved, on time management information, accuracy of booking and satisfaction surveys.

There are three different aspects to the monitoring of supplier performance post-contract:

1. Gathering factual, and therefore objective, information about their performance as per contract. It is good practice to be as consistent as possible in the approach to the performance monitoring.

2. Customer experience. This should be as objective as possible, although in some cases it may be subjective. Information can be achieved through customer satisfaction surveys which can be quite short and distributed by email.

3. The supplier’s experience of working with the your travellers and travel bookers must be considered in the evaluation, as it might be the case that they are facing challenges.

Remember, performance monitoring can be a time-consuming task and so the effort and methods should be proportionate to the value and importance of the contract.