Service level agreements in charging are frequently written as a percentage and nothing else. That number is unenforceable without three further things, and both parties usually know it at signature.
The same applies internally: a target nobody measures consistently is a statement of intent rather than a commitment.
Four things a commitment needs
A commitment missing any of these cannot be enforced. Missing the first, the parties will disagree about whether it was met at all.
- A measurement method, defining exactly what counts as available and how it is sampled.
- An exclusion list, naming what does not count against the target.
- A reporting obligation, specifying who produces the number and how often.
- A consequence, describing what happens when the target is missed.
Define availability precisely
Availability of what: the charger, the connector, the site, or the ability to complete a session? A site with four connectors where one is faulty is either seventy-five percent available or fully unavailable depending on the definition.
Whether measurement is by connector-hours or by session outcome changes the number substantially, and both are defensible. Choosing without stating it is what produces disputes.
Exclusions are where the negotiation actually is
Vandalism, vehicle impact, supply failures, network outages outside the provider's control, planned maintenance and force majeure are commonly excluded, and each is reasonable.
The risk is an exclusion list broad enough that almost any real outage falls inside it. Reading the list against last year's actual incidents is the useful test.
Alert on what someone will act on
Alerting and SLA measurement are different jobs. Measurement counts everything; alerting should fire only where a human should do something now.
Systems that alert on every event train people to ignore alerts, at which point the genuine ones are missed too. Suppression is the feature that makes alerting valuable.
Escalation needs to be time-based
An alert acknowledged and then forgotten is worse than one nobody saw, because it appears handled. Escalation after a defined period without progress, to a named person rather than a queue, is what prevents that.
Out of hours coverage is where most escalation designs fail, and it is where drivers most notice a broken charger.
Report against the definition, continuously
A number produced monthly by hand will be disputed. One produced continuously from the same data both parties can see is far harder to argue with and far more useful for operations.
Where a provider reports its own performance, the customer having independent visibility of the underlying data is what makes the arrangement credible.