SLAs create more problems than they solve
SLAs are not just insufficient. Your IT Service Desk’s singular focus on meeting rigid SLA targets, such as first response times or speed of ticket resolution, can even lead to poorer service for end-users.
They had created an SLA for their chat service such that end-users should not have to wait longer than 30 seconds for a first chat response. This sounded great in theory.
But in reality, their outsourced Service Desk with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) was so focused on achieving this SLA that their Service Agents were responding to multiple chats at the same time. Frustratingly, they would leave end-users hanging for many minutes between subsequent responses, since they were juggling multiple chats.
This is a classic example of how even with the best intentions, SLAs can backfire, creating more inefficiency for your end-users.
After discovering what was really happening with the chat for end-users through Experience Management, Wilhelmsen decided to suspend their SLA on chat response.
Watch Marte Thorbjønsen (Director of IT Core Operations, Wilhelmsen) discuss this issue and why SLAs alone cannot help your MSP to increase end-user productivity without Experience Level Agreement (XLA) thinking in this webinar.
From SLAs to XLAs
Today’s Enterprise IT end-users, like consumers, increasingly expect great experiences. Experience matters to your employees and by extension, your business! IT hence needs to move from relying on traditional SLAs to embracing Experience Level Agreements (XLAs).
In short, XLAs are a reimagining of service level agreements (SLAs) that focus on what's most important to end-users. They measure the performance of IT by quantifying the end-user experience and IT service outcomes with end-user-centric metrics.
Ultimately, SLAs measure the process, while XLAs measure the outcome and value of IT for end-users. It’s time to use the right metric to measure the right thing.
In this week’s episode of Happy in 15, Pasi and I also discuss SLAs vs XLAs and the importance of including rewards in agreements with your Service Desk, instead of just sanctions and SLAs. Watch it below.