What are Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)?

An experience level agreement, or XLA, is a commitment between parties to the provision of a defined experience. It may be an agreement to improve the experience of employees who are new joiners to a company or an agreement to improve a particular aspect of the employee's working experience.

XLAs can take many shapes and sizes, being implemented by organisations wanting to improve their employee/customer experience or by service providers looking to add employee experience initiatives to their services. All XLAs have one thing in common: creating a defined experience that can be measured and improved upon.

The rise in emphasis on user experience came with what is known as the experience economy. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, The Experience Economy is an economic phase theorised by Pine and Gilmour in their book of the same name. In it, the authors propose that customers have new priorities when it comes to the interactions they have with businesses, mainly the importance placed on their time.

'Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time’

- Jim Rohn, American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker

In the economy prior to experience, the service economy, the emphasis was on the efficiency and effectiveness with which organisations could fulfil a service.

For example, coffee went from a product you could buy in supermarket and prepare at home to something you could purchase a cup of ready made from a shop. Whilst this enabled the quick fulfilment of services, it naturally encouraged a service-centric view for organisations. With customers coming in use the service, the providers of said service looked towards ensuring the service was running smoothly. Concerns surrounded whether equipment was working, available for 99.9% of the time; in other words, were the service level agreements (SLAs) being fulfilled. What this missed out was the experience of the human on the receiving and providing end of the service. Maintaining a working and available service is great, but people began to ask whether it fulfilled what they wanted from the service, how those providing the service felt about their ability to work.

With this change in priorities came a change in behaviours from customers. If they didn't find your company was worth, in their perspective, spending time with, they could put up with you at best, ignore you at worst.

The same principles are now applying to employees. Money is no longer the primary motivating factor for many people seeking employment; instead people look for purpose and an employer who will treat them fairly. To this end, if an employee doesn't feel that their employer is supporting them enough to fulfil their job or what they're looking for from their employment; in other words, not a valuable use of their time and energy, they feel empowered to look for employment elsewhere. With more and more organisations becoming aware of the importance of understanding and managing experience, we have moved from a society predominantly focused on service to one incorporating experience.

From here, thoughts swirled about how important it is to understand whether or not people were having a good experience with their service, or components thereof. After all, this is surely also contributing to the fulfilment of the service. This plus the rise in experiences that customers were advocating for, where their time spent with an organisation becomes a primary factor for their choice of service, put experience on the map for modern business leaders, and with it, experience level agreements (XLAs).

An XLA is designed to measure experience. To establish one, an organisation will look to areas of experience where it is lacking, possibly through interviews or analysing current sentiment data they hold or informal observations, and once they understand where experience needs to improve, they can begin the process of designing, building and implementing an XLA. Throughout all of this process lies the question, how can experience be improved?

The organisation must measure how people feel about their experience, something achievable by asking how they feel about the experience. Understanding these feelings is how we understand experience and provides us the ability to score areas based on feelings, thus alerting organisations where the experience needs improvement.

This is an simplified version of how XLAs work. If we're able to combine sentiment data with any service-based data such as SLA/KPI metrics, we add additional context to sentiment and understand fully why something is causing poor experience and exactly what could be going wrong. The key here is that XLAs provide organisations with data to inform them of the areas where experience is poor. When we know what areas are causing a poor experience, we can begin to devise the actions to overcome them. Through XLAs, organisations are enabled to:

• Identify customer/employee pain points
• Identify customer/employee moments that matter
• Identify current positive aspects of experience to continue

In this podcast episode, renowned ITSM expert Anthony Orr joins Richard Pharro, CEO of APMG International, for a discussion on service level agreements (SLAs) and the shift towards experience level agreements (XLAs). They explore how SLAs affect organisational behaviour, discussing their advantages and disadvantages. Anthony also talks about the industry's move from SLAs to XLAs and how focusing on customer experience significantly impacts organisational success. Throughout the episode, they delve into IT service management, giving listeners a clear understanding of the evolving landscape and the importance of prioritising the customer in service delivery.

When we resolve poor experiences and provide moments that matter to our customers and employee, we encourage the following benefits:

• Better enabled productivity
• Innovation – through sentiment, XLAs can point out areas to invest in
• Increased commercial value
• Increased customer loyalty
• A working environment employees will want to stay with - reduced attrition

Let's focus on three of these benefits:

Often, the factors contributing to poor employee experience include apps unavailable when needed or poor performing devices required for their job. Using XLAs, organisations can understand their employees' needs, take actions and create a working environment where employees are better enabled to be productive without hindrance. When we understand the pain points, we know where the root cause lies and can take actions to fix it.

Often an end-result of positive employee experience, XLAs can also measure the moments that matter for customers, providing organisations the data to design positive and unique customer experiences. When we provide memorable experiences for customers, they are more likely to revisit. Additionally, when we support employees in their experience, we put them in a better position to support the customer. From increased confidence/reassurance around using technology to assist the customer experience or the motivation that comes from knowing your supported in your role, the effects of supporting the employee experience are passed onto the customer.

Simply put, when employees feel supported in their workplace, where their concerns are listened to, and action is seen to be acted on, they are more likely to want to stay.

We live in a world where money is no longer the primary motivating factor for employees, particularly for employees of younger generations looking for purpose and a sense of community in their work. It therefore becomes an imperative to support their employee experience, identifying what is important and measuring the experience of these aspects, before working to improve them, if we want to keep these employees.

This could mean adaptability in working hours for those who work best in early mornings or late afternoons, ensuring productivity-supporting apps are available at the times when employees need them, or providing and measuring the effectiveness of regular check-ins with managers or mentors. If all of this can be measured via XLAs, through sentiment, operational metrics, technical data, or all three, employees will feel better supported by IT and their employers, and organisations stand a better chance of keeping their remote employees. With the opportunity to support both our business and our employees, XLAs present an evolutionary step up from the more service-focused SLA.

XLAs can bring great benefits to organisations, but they also present challenges. However, for each challenge, there are solutions. XLA challenges can present themselves in a number of ways:

A big challenge for organisations looking to improve experience can lie with their company culture. It goes without saying therefore, ensuring your company culture is ready and capable to undertake an experience management project is very influential on the project's longevity. Such a project may mean an organisation needs to face negative sentiment towards it, and is both open to criticism and adopting change to overcome it.

XLAs will likely measure data from a variety of teams. Aligning the goals and understanding of an XLA across these teams is important, as well as ensuring each team understand the role they play in the customer/employee experience. Carrying out tasks in silos and conflicting priorities can harm a successful XLA implementation.

For a variety of different reasons, an organisation may be measuring the wrong experience areas. Identifying the right measurement areas is crucial to an XLA since not doing so risks us measuring those areas lacking in value to our employees/customers and encouraging a lack of trust in the initiative. Therefore, teams need to ensure they are measuring what is important to their target audience and regularly check in once an XLA is implemented to ensure the measurement areas are still valid.

With the implementation of XLAs comes the need to establish a team of people whose task it is to oversee the XLAs moving forward. This team is called the experience management office (XMO) and links to overcoming the earlier challenges mentioned.

An XMO needs to exist within a culture where transparency and cross collaboration is encouraged and blame is not. The XMO needs to have the right measurements to ensure the right actions can be proposed to overcome experience concerns. Lastly, the XMO needs to be established as a team whose roles and actions are taken seriously. This enables continuous experience management to take place and the benefits that follow.

Experience is an accepted part of our interactions with businesses. If you pick up anything from this article, this should be it. The value placed on time is crucial. The fulfilment of a service is a given for us, now the focus is on the fulfilment of said service being delivered in the most comfortable way for us, be it adapted to particular customer needs or a service being accessible for employees when they need it.

By focusing on XLAs, organisations put themselves in better standing to attract and keep customers and employees, whilst maintaining the kind of supportive environment that customers will want to keep coming back to and employees not want to leave.

Before you can begin to adopt XLAs, you need to raise awareness of them within your organisation. In our experience optimization framework, we call this phase evangelize, as the organisation looks to get the right people aware of and excited by the prospect of XLAs and the benefits they can bring. Once this is done, they can begin the process of understanding what their current employee/customer experience is and where they would like it to be.

A key part of becoming ready to adopt XLAs is having knowledge of them. If you are looking to get started with XLAs, experience management, or generally in improving 

user experience of your organisation, Experience Collab can help. We are global leaders in XLA best practices, drawing upon a wealth of, well, experience. Our three courses, Experience Essentials, Experience Foundation, and Experience Practitioner, are taught by a wide variety of excellent training organisations we've partnered with around the globe.

Alternatively, if you would like to learn more about how organisations design and implement XLAs, see our experience optimization framework and XLA design methodology best practices pages. We have these and many more resources for you to discover everything XLA.

Pine, B.J. and Gilmore, J.H. (2011) The experience economy. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.