Imagine you’re at the supermarket, and there’s been an update to the company’s loyalty app. You open it up to find the barcode that registers your account has moved. Now, instead of it being on the home screen, you need to click into another section to find it.
Mildly annoyed, you finish your shop and head to the checkout. It takes you three more seconds than usual to grab that barcode and complete your transaction. No big deal, right?
Wrong. As you walk away, a queue of 10 customers forms behind you, each taking those three extra seconds swiping to their barcodes. That’s 30 seconds added to the cashier’s processing time. Multiply it by the 1,000 shoppers the store might see in an hour, and an entire 50 minutes is wasted.
At head office, the IT team’s high-fiving. The update’s rolled out, the interface looks fantastic, and everything’s running as planned. If only they knew what was going on for the employees and customers actually using their app.
And they could, had they implemented XLAs.
What are XLAs?
As their name suggests, experience-level agreements (XLAs, sometimes known as ELAs) are a variation of service-level agreements (SLAs) that focus on the end-user experience. Whether that end-user is your employees, your customers, or both, the way they engage with–and feel about–your solution is critical.
And XLAs aren’t simply an exercise in gathering sentiment. The most effective agreements combine the telemetry of your service with the feedback you receive on it and the emotional impact of it.
Essentially, you must ask yourself three questions: how reliable is my service? How well does it perform? And how do my users perceive it?
Why are XLAs important?
So, you’ve got performance management software, and you’ve set telemetry SLAs that are always met. Your IT team knows what it’s doing, and it makes sure your users can access the systems they need, when they need them. But does it know what’s going wrong once those users get into those systems, and what’s going right?
You obviously can’t ask every single employee and every individual customer how they’re feeling. Still, you can give them a platform for their thoughts–then combine this with your telemetry data to find trends, remedy issues, and make the people you serve happier and more productive.
This combination is key. Because if your employees consistently and collectively rate one of your systems negatively, you may assume it’s because it isn’t working to standard–when in reality, it’s just taking everyone too long or requiring too much effort to do what they need to get done.
It’s all about shifting your IT experts’ mindsets to journey-based services rather than services that perform their function and nothing more. It’s about considering the time it takes people to access the systems they need, how the platform looks and feels to use, and what behaviors users display.
It’s about having the data-based insight to make informed decisions on prioritizing investments, identifying skills gaps, and improving policies and processes. And it’s about adding the relevant shortcut if it takes 10,000 clicks to process an order.
How can I implement XLAs?
The good news is that there are digital experience, which can gather all the information you need– qualitative and quantitative–in one easy-to-find, simple-to-interpret dashboard.
Aternity’s sentiments capability goes beyond basic surveys, allowing you to use human-defined or department-agreed thresholds to establish what a positive end-user experience looks like for your business and your service at a granular level. For example, completing a process in three seconds might feel too slow for some users, too fast for others, and perfect for a few.
Not only can tools like Aternity flag specific issues like this, but they can also measure input across every stage of the delivery chain. Think telemetry data from your entire IT platform, feedback from your employees, sentiments from your customers, and everything in between.
So, you get a complete picture of how different elements perform in different scenarios throughout different journeys for different people–and what those people would ideally like you to do about it. And sometimes, it’s an action as small as moving your loyalty app’s barcode back to where it used to be.
In today’s increasingly digital, ever-demanding world, speedy response times and slick branding aren’t enough. To achieve your goals, stay competitive, keep your employees, and satisfy your customers, you need to transform and innovate. All based on authentic user experiences rather than IT’s assumed outcomes.
XLAs are one powerful metric that can empower you to do exactly that. Get in touch with us today and discover solutions that assess not just how well your systems are working, but how well they’re working for the people that matter.