What Are Xlas? Experience Level Agreements Explained

As part of the introductions during trainings that I conduct, a common icebreaker I use is worst ride sharing experience.

For the most part, participants will talk about drivers (rude, smelly, creepy, crazy) as opposed to talking about issues with the ride sharing app or billing. Some stories are hilarious, others downright depressing. Yet almost all participants have a particular emotional connection to their experience. And that connection became a very strong determinant of their perception of the service and how they market it to anyone else.

This shows the importance of experiences to customers—and why these experiences must matter to the service provider. This is where XLAs help.

SLAs vs Experience

To understand XLAs, let’s briefly look at SLAs.

In service management, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been the main reference point in determining whether the service provider is meeting the expectations of their clients. The ISO 20000 standard defines SLA as a documented agreement between the organization and the customer that identifies services and their agreed performance.

SLAs have primarily been based on service metrics such as:

• Availability
• Capacity
• Reliability

However, one major shortcoming is that the source of the metrics may fail to capture the overall end-to-end experience of the customers. For example, metrics like application availability or transaction success rate might make sense to a service manager. But in the eyes of a customer, these metrics fail to:

• Explain slowness or poor performance during a critical period.
• Capture issues arising from interactions with support staff.

This is known as the watermelon effect: Metrics are green on the outside—good—but red on the inside because of the misalignment between the service provider and the customer as to their perception of the service performance.

What are XLAs?

Enter EXperience Level Agreements (XLAs). Experience Level Agreements put customer experience (CX) at the center of service performance, ensuring that all service interactions and touchpoints are considered when defining whether the service meets the agreed performance level.

ITIL^® defines customer experience as the sum of all functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a service consumer.

XLAs measure business outcomes from the customer perspective. Like SLAs, XLAs look at whether services were available or performed to a certain degree. But XLAs go beyond this, also tracking whether that availability and performance supported the customer to achieve what they wanted.