by Janus Boye
You have probably heard about SLA's. Service Level Agreements that contractually define what service you can expect, like uptime for your website, maintenance windows for your app or that your search has filters. That's fine and good, but what about the experience?
Casper van Amelsvoort works with Workplace Services at Rabobank and a year ago he introduced the idea of moving from Service Level Agreements to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). If your website is up and running, but the experience is really bad? Slow loading or what if your search engine doesn't give you reasonable and expected search results?
In a recent member conference call, Casper elaborated on the idea, what the difference means in practice and how he is considering implementing it.
It’s all about the user experience
In the call, Casper opened with what he defines as the new and big hallenge for IT:
To think about and create meaningful experiences for employees
As Maya Angelou said: People will never forget how you made them feel
Using the famous quote from American poet Maya Angelou, which says that people will never forget how you made them feel, he translated it like this to our context:
Experience is simply about how someone feels about a product or service or interaction
How do we get to digital solutions that excite? Shadow IT often exists exactly because corporate IT can’t deliver. Might the move to XLAs actually address one of the bigger IT problems of our time?
Service Level Agreements vs. Experience Level Agreements
As Casper said, Rabobank is still at the beginning of the journey, but the hope is that XLA can come in to bridge the gap between IT and the business.
Where SLAs have primarily been based on service metrics such as:
Availability
Capacity
Reliability
XLAs rather measure business outcomes from the customer perspective.
The below slide shows a few of the key differences - note the key difference towards measuring outputs vs outcomes.
A combination of XLAs and SLAs is needed
“Look out for watermelons”
Like Casper said using the famous watermelon analogy: You can fall into the trap by thinking that just because everything looks green on the outside, it is not red on the inside.
There are still areas, where it makes perfect sense to have KPIs and use SLAs to govern. XLAs is a commitment to creating a defined experience, supported by empirical data points used to design, deliver and improve human-centric services and products.
In closing, Casper shared some good questions as you consider embarking on the journey:
How do you want to make users feel about Workplace services, processes, or you…
How do you want to transform from delivering services to delivering experiences
How do you change perspective from managing incidents & problems to managing conversations
This will lead to governance changes, but keep in mind that satisfaction is not the same as experience and to complicate matters: When experience and context changes over time, behaviour changes accordingly.
Good luck!
Learn more about Experience Level Agreements
The presentation Casper gave was based on The Essence of Experience and Mastering the XLA Framework developed by XLACollab (formerly known as CitrusCollab).
You can also download the slides (PDF) from the call and finally, you can also lean back and enjoy the 27-minute recording below