Practical Guide to XLAs: What are IT Experience Level Agreements?

Introduction

By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to define XLAs that mean something, how to build the experience management practice that makes them actionable, and how to avoid the traps that derail most organizations.

Specifically, you’ll learn:

How to measure experience in a way that generates insight, not just data.
Why transparency, such as sharing data with partners, vendors and your whole IT team, is the multiplier that makes improvement stick.
How to identify the specific friction points costing your employees time, productivity, and happiness.
How to prioritize and act on what the data tells you. Continuously, not once a year.

Organizations that take this approach don’t just improve their scores. They transform how IT is perceived and how IT perceives itself. Throughout, you’ll find real customer examples showing what this looks like in practice, including the data behind the results.

You can also download this guide as a PDF and share it with your colleagues.

What are experience level agreements?
Why is IT Experience Management (ITXM™) needed?
How can IT implement experience management?
Customer cases
Download this guide

What are Experience Level Agreements?

Chapter 1

Different definitions of XLAs

“SLAs measure the process or the completion of an objective. XLAs, on the other hand, measure the outcome and value."

XLAs mean slightly different things to different practitioners.

Here’s how some of the most respected voices in ITSM define them:

Giarte, a research and consultancy company, defines XLAs as less like traditional agreements (such as SLAs) and more focused on achieving desired outcomes.
Alan Nance from XLA Collab defines XLAs as putting outcomes that determine the consumer experience at the center of design efforts.
Hannah Price from TOPdesk explains XLAs as how the customer feels about how they were treated.

The common thread: XLAs shift the question from “did we hit the SLA?” to “did we actually help?”

That shift sounds simple. However, operationalizing it requires a different measurement infrastructure entirely, which is what experience management provides.

What do XLAs look like?

XLAs don’t have a universal formula that companies should follow.

Instead, XLAs should be tailored to an organization’s IT problem areas, and the outcome and value they want to achieve. In simple terms, it means XLAs stay relevant in a way that static SLAs rarely do.

You don’t have to choose between XLAs and SLAs. Most mature IT organizations run both: SLAs governing operational processes, XLAs governing human outcomes.

What matters is knowing which one tells you whether IT is genuinely working for people.

Unlike SLAs, XLA targets should evolve. Employee expectations change, services evolve, and what counts as “good” shifts over time. Build in a regular review cadence from day one.

XLA metrics in comparison to SLA metrics

SLAs vs. XLAs

SLA - Service Level Agreement	XLA - Experience Level Agreement
Measures the output of IT.	Measures the outcome of IT.
Measures the processes.	Measures the added value and productivity of services.
SLAs focus on high level objectives, that can easily be met. However, they don't paint an in-depth picture of what is really happening within IT.	Brings focus directly to end-users' experience and needs.
SLAs show if IT is delivering projects within the right time frame and budget - ignoring the true success measure(s) of projects.	With XLAs you can bring business value and increase productivity of end-users.
Focus on sanctions.	Focus on rewards.
Measurement stays the same.	Measurement target levels constantly change.

It's also worth mentioning that you can use XLAs and SLAs in tandem with each other, you don't have to simply rip and replace SLAs with XLAs. The important thing to note, however, is the need for the capabilities and metrics that measure success where outcomes occur and value is created.

There also needs to be the ability to adjust the target levels set in XLAs – which we cover in later chapters – due to business and end-user expectations constantly changing, as well as unprecedented phenomena occurring, which no one has no control over.

Not just sanctions! Rewards, too

One key difference with XLAs, which leads to a fundamentally different culture in IT, is rewarding performance rather than simply using the agreement to define and impose punitive sanctions.

Including performance-based rewards in an XLA highlights the need for all parties to work together to improve end-user experience.

When your managed service provider knows their contract includes rewards for measurably improving employee productivity, and not just keeping SLAs green, the whole dynamic of the relationship changes. You’re no longer managing against failure. You’re collaborating toward impact.

"Not just sanctions, but incentivize your service provider to make your employees more productive. We’ve seen our customers make 69% improvements in end-user productivity using this strategy." — Sami Kallio, CEO of HappySignals

Benefits of XLAs

XLAs measure the business value of the service desk
XLA measurement increases co-operation
XLAs motivate service desk teams
XLAs drive business value

What is the best method for introducing XLAs between customers and service providers?

Both customers and service providers have compelling reasons to embrace XLAs and experience management. And it's no wonder why - XLAs offer a host of benefits that surpass traditional SLAs. XLAs and experience management are still new, and they are also a change to the IT organization. For these reasons, we recommend taking a step-by-step approach to both. Don’t try to jump from zero to a perfect world. Instead, a step-by-step approach will help guarantee that your organization gets quick results and the wider team behind the change to a more employee-centric way of working.

XLAs and experience management should be seen as an IT leadership tool - helping the IT organization to make better decisions and deliver more value to the business.

The main recommendations related to using XLAs in contractual agreements can be summarized as:

When driving XLAs and experience management, focus on changing the way of working compared to focusing on reaching a certain target level.
When agreeing on the way of working, include both the responsibilities of the customer and the responsibilities of the IT service provider.
Agree on how priorities and XLA targets are set continuously (every six months). Targets for improvements should be set, but not with penalties.
If possible, don’t use penalties for SLAs or even for XLAs. They just force the IT service provider to optimize the average numbers, and that won’t drive the preferred outcome.
Use XLA rewards only in cases when both the customer and IT service provider are experienced in using XLAs.
When calculating your official XLA scores, we recommend that you use the last two months to get the score.

Discover invaluable insights on incorporating Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) into your IT supplier contracts from our white paper on How to Incorporate XLAs into Outsourcing Contracts, authored by Neil Keating from Bright Horse and Sami Kallio from HappySignals. Discover invaluable insights on incorporating Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) into your IT supplier contracts for an enhanced employee experience.

MSPs and the need for Experience Management

MSPs live and die by SLAs. But here’s the problem: A contract that only measures process compliance gives your customer no visibility into whether their employees are actually happy. It gives you no early warning before renewal becomes a conversation.

The watermelon effect is real in MSP relationships. SLAs are green on the outside. End-users are unhappy. And nobody finds out until a dissatisfied customer doesn’t renew.

Experience management changes that dynamic: it surfaces how end-users actually feel about the services they receive, in real time, before things escalate further. With experience data, MSPs gain something they’ve never had before: a continuous, end-user-verified view of service performance.

Not a delayed CSAT survey or a quarterly review, but a real-time signal on what’s working and what isn’t, across every customer. Traditional CSAT is just not enough. It’s simply a snapshot of sentiment, not a management tool. A “yes” or “no”, but not “why.”

The MSPs winning on experience are capturing feedback at the moment of the interaction, in context, with questions that reflect what employees actually care about. The MSPs that get this right build a continuous feedback loop into every service interaction.

The result is faster identification of friction, more targeted improvements, and the data to prove value at renewal time. Experience management also changes the customer relationship.

When both the MSP and the customer are looking at the same real-time experience data, conversations shift from blame to collaboration. Issues get flagged and fixed faster. Trust compounds. And because MSPs serve multiple customers, the improvements scale.

A process fix that addresses a friction point for one customer often resolves the same issue across ten others. Experience data turns individual fixes into systematic improvements.

Common mistakes when taking XLAs into use

Unfortunately, XLA adoption is not always smooth sailing. There are many potential mistakes to avoid, placed into two categories: 1) XLA mistakes in comparison to SLAs, and 2) Common issues when adopting XLAs.

XLA mistakes in comparison to SLAs

1. Avoid positioning XLAs in the same way as SLAs

Before designing XLAs, be honest about why your SLAs exist. In many organizations, SLAs are there for reasons that have nothing to do with improving service:

ITIL says so
IT departments use them to defend their performance to stakeholders
They’ve been inherited from previous teams or tools
IT believes “we need them” to control providers

SLAs designed for these purposes give you something to point to, not something to improve with. XLAs designed the same way will have the same problem.

Every XLA should start with a question: what specific experience problem are we trying to solve? If you can’t answer that clearly, you’re not ready to set the target yet.

2. Avoid creating XLAs in the same way as SLAs

SLAs are usually designed by IT, for IT. XLAs designed the same way miss the point entirely. If the agreement is meant to reflect the employee’s experience, employees need to be part of designing what “good” looks like. This is not optional.

Resist the one-size-fits-all approach. A service desk XLA for a logistics company looks different from one at a financial institution. The measures that matter to a field engineer are different from those that matter to a knowledge worker. Tailor to the actual experience, not a generic template.

3. Don’t use XLAs the same way as SLAs

The most common XLA anti-pattern: setting the target, hitting it, and moving on. That’s SLA behavior. XLAs are designed to drive continuous improvement. The target is a floor, not a ceiling, and the data should tell you where to raise it. Experience is not static. A happiness score of +65 might be excellent in year one and mediocre in year three, as expectations rise and your organization matures.

Review your XLA targets at least quarterly and let the experience data, not internal consensus, drive what “good” looks like. "Experience is not just an organizational change or new way of measuring, but it’s a cultural change."

Common issues when adopting XLAs

1. Confusion-based issues

The single most common source of XLA failure is treating them as a renamed SLA. One word changes. Everything else stays the same. The measurement culture, the governance model, the review cadence, all SLA. Before you launch XLAs, define what ‘experience’ means concretely in your organization.

This is change management, not just measurement management. Get leadership aligned on what you’re optimizing for before you set a single target.

2. Common adoption issues

Don’t rip out your SLAs. The organizations that succeed with XLAs run both in parallel: SLAs governing process compliance, XLAs governing the human outcome. Introduce XLAs as an addition that reveals what SLAs can’t see, not a replacement that removes what people already trust.

Build a review rhythm from the start. Monthly check-ins on the data, quarterly reviews of the targets, and annual reassessment of the XLA structure itself.

Experience is a continuous evolution, and your governance model needs to match that cadence.

3. Common usage issues

An XLA without an experience management infrastructure is just a number. To know why your score is where it is, which service areas are dragging it down, which employee segments are most affected, and what to do about it.

You need the continuous measurement, transparency, and improvement cycle that experience management provides. XLAs are the target. Experience management is how you hit it.

Why is IT Experience Management (ITXM™) needed?

Chapter 2

Employees now judge IT by the same standards they use for consumer technology. Instant, invisible, reliable.

When IT falls short of that standard, they don’t file a complaint; they lose time and trust and route around IT where they can.

The cost is invisible in your SLA dashboard and very visible in your productivity data. In most large organizations, IT makes improvement decisions based on ticket volume, escalations, and gut feeling. These are lagging indicators at best.

Experience management gives IT a real-time signal on what’s actually affecting people before it shows up in ticket volume, before it becomes an escalation, before it costs the business.

IT Experience Management (ITXM™) is the practice of continuously measuring, sharing, and acting on experience data across all IT services. To improve outcomes for employees and demonstrate value to the business.

It’s how IT moves from keeping the lights on to genuinely enabling the business.

The ITXM™ Framework Explained

The ITXM™ Framework is a continuous four-stage cycle for managing IT by outcomes rather than outputs.

It works for organizations of any size, whether IT is internal or outsourced, and whether you’re starting from scratch or building on an existing measurement practice. The cycle runs continuously: measure, share, identify, improve — then measure again.

Each pass around the cycle builds on the last.

Organizations that have been running ITXM™ for two or more years don’t just have better scores. They have a fundamentally different relationship between IT and the business.

1. Measure experiences

Measurement is where you start. It’s more important than the target you set. Without a baseline, you’re guessing where you are.

Without continuous data, you can’t tell whether your improvements are working.

Most organizations are surprised by what the first months of measurement reveal. For measurement to be successful, the following elements need to be in place:

End-user feedback needs to be continuous, with data captured every day, not twice a year or in an ad hoc manner
Feedback needs to be captured at the right time – when people have their experiences, not much later
Experience measurement needs to be in context, such that it relates to what an end-user uses
Feedback questions need to add value – so don’t ask about what you already know
Start to measure experience before changes are made, not after them

2. Share the experience data

This is the step most organizations resist. Sharing experience data, especially when scores are low, feels risky. It isn’t.

But in reality, what’s risky is having bad data and not knowing it. Transparency creates shared accountability: when everyone sees the same picture, everyone is oriented toward the same improvements.

One thing most IT teams don’t expect: on average, 75% of experience feedback is positive.

Sharing that data doesn’t just surface problems; it also gives service desk agents and IT teams visibility into the impact they’re already having. That visibility matters for motivation and retention.

3. Identify improvements

Without experience data, improvement agendas are set by whoever makes the most noise. That means 13% of tickets, which cause 80% of lost productivity, go unfixed, while IT spends cycles on visible but low-impact issues.

Experience data inverts that: it shows where employees are actually losing time, and what’s actually driving the frustration.

The goal at this stage isn’t to have all the answers, it’s to ask the right questions. Which service areas have the highest lost time? Which assignment groups correlate with the lowest happiness scores? Which ticket types are being resolved quickly but leaving employees still stuck?

The data surfaces the pattern. Your team applies the judgment.

4. Improve what matters most

The improvements that matter most are those that save employees time and reduce frustration, not those that make IT metrics look good.

That distinction sounds obvious. In practice, it requires a deliberate choice to prioritize employee impact over internal KPIs. The ITXM™ Framework keeps that choice visible.

When improvements show up in the data, share them. Publish the before and after. Show the service desk team what their work translates into in terms of employee time saved.

Show the CIO what the improvement trajectory looks like. Experience management doesn’t just improve outcomes, it makes IT’s value visible to the whole business.

Digital transformation and the importance of Experience Management

Digital transformation projects have a well-documented failure rate.

The reason is almost never technical. It’s that organizations measure delivery rather than adoption and impact. A system that goes live on schedule and sits unused is a delivery success and a business failure.

Experience management fixes this by anchoring digital transformation to the outcome that actually matters: did this change make employees more productive and less frustrated?

That question can be answered continuously with data throughout the project.

There are three specific ways experience management strengthens digital transformation:

1. Measurement and metrics

SLAs tell you whether IT delivered. XLAs tell you whether the delivery worked for employees. Both matter, but only one tells you whether the transformation actually transformed anything.

2. Data-driven decisions

Real-time experience feedback during a transformation project is the early warning system that catches adoption problems before they become business problems. It lets you course-correct during rollout, not after the post-mortem.

3. Culture

Culture is where most transformation programs stall. Technology gets deployed; behaviors don’t change. Experience management makes culture change measurable, so you can see when adoption is happening and where resistance is concentrated. And by building rewards into your XLAs, you align your service providers’ incentives with the behavior change you’re trying to drive.

Process of Experience Management

HappySignals brings you the process to manage experiences and set experience level targets.

Learn more about our IT Experience Management (ITXM™) Framework.

How can IT implement Experience Management?

Chapter 3

Creating an Experience Management culture for IT

Experience management isn’t a project with an end date. It’s a capability you build progressively, and the organizations that do it best start simple and layer in sophistication over time.

Think of it as a pyramid. Each level builds on the one below. You can’t set meaningful XLA targets without reliable experience data. You can’t drive improvement if the data isn’t being shared. Each stage has to be solid before the next one delivers value.

Continuous measurement

Start here. Before you set targets, before you design improvement programs, before you talk to your MSP about XLAs: measure. Capture feedback continuously, at the point of each IT interaction, across all major service areas. On average, 75% of feedback is positive. But the 25% that isn’t is where your improvement roadmap lives.

Transparency

Make the data visible. Not just to IT leadership, but to service desk agents, service owners, managed service providers, and business stakeholders. Transparency turns experience data from a monitoring tool into a collaboration tool.

When everyone can see the same picture, improvement becomes a shared goal rather than IT’s problem to solve in private.

Set experience targets

Once you have data and alignment, set targets that reflect the outcomes your employees actually care about: happiness and productivity, not just process metrics.

Make them ambitious but grounded in your baseline. And build in a mechanism to review and raise them as performance improves.

Measuring experiences from end-users

It’s not your average CSAT questionnaire

CSAT and experience measurement are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the most common reasons IT organizations underinvest in the right data. CSAT asks: Were you satisfied with that interaction? Experience measurement asks: Did IT enable you to do your job?

The second question is harder to answer, and much more valuable. It captures lost time, recurring friction, and the cumulative effect of IT on how employees experience their work.

How to measure?

The annual IT satisfaction survey is one of the most expensive things IT organizations do, with little return. It’s slow, generic, and by the time the results are in, half the problems it surfaces have either resolved on their own or gotten worse.

The alternative: continuous, contextual feedback captured at the moment of each IT interaction. Short, relevant questions tied to the specific service or ticket just resolved. Response rates go from 4% to 25%. Data goes from a snapshot to a real-time signal. Decisions go from gut-feeling to evidence-based.

You don’t need to survey everyone all at once. Focus on high-traffic touchpoints first: service desk interactions, common incident types, and recently deployed services. Build from there. The goal is a continuous stream of signal, not a comprehensive census.

What to measure?

Measure across all IT touchpoints, not just the service desk. Devices, enterprise applications, remote working infrastructure, and onboarding. Each service area has its own experience profile and its own internal owner.

Give each owner their own view of the data. Start narrow. Two or three high-volume service areas. Build the measurement habit, demonstrate the value, and expand. Organizations that try to measure everything from day one end up measuring nothing well.

Setting experience-level targets

Targets only drive behavior if they’re visible. Once your XLA targets are set, surface them. In operational dashboards, in team meetings, and in the data views your service owners and vendors use every day.

An XLA buried in a contract nobody reads isn’t a management tool.
Real-time visibility matters. Service desk agents who can see live experience scores respond differently than those who only hear about results in a monthly review.

Transparency at the operational level is what turns XLA targets into daily behavior. Treat XLA targets as living documents. Review them at least quarterly. As performance improves and employee expectations rise, what counts as “good” will shift. Your targets need to shift with it, or you’ll hit the number and stop improving.

What can Experience Management do for IT?

The results are measurable. On average, HappySignals customers achieve a 26% improvement in employee productivity when comparing their first two months of measurement to their most recent two months. That’s not a marginal gain, it’s a structural shift in how IT impacts the business.

Customer cases

Chapter 4

These organizations didn’t just implement XLAs. They built the experience management infrastructure that makes XLAs meaningful.
The results show what that shift looks like in practice!

CUSTOMER CASE: THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Killing the watermelon: How ANU built one shared view of IT experience

The organization The Australian National University is one of Australia's premier research institutions. Its IT Services group supports over 22,000 staff and students across multiple campuses. This is the kind of scale and complexity where a single bad ticket can quietly erode trust in all of IT!

The challenge Before HappySignals, ANU measured satisfaction with NPS tools that looked fine on the surface but missed what was happening underneath.

"We used to have the watermelon effect," says Feisar Joya, Manager of the Service Management Office: green on the outside, red at the core. The team knew scores weren't telling them where employees were actually losing time.

What they did ANU started with culture, not metrics.

Feisar and IT Service Management Specialist Tiffany Vincent reframed feedback across ITS as a tool for improvement, not blame.

From there, they acted on the signal: color-coded outage communications to cut stress during incidents, restructured resolver groups to reduce reassignments and clarify ownership, and a follow-up process for every piece of feedback scored below 6. This made users felt heard.

Crucially, NPS was never allowed to become a team scorecard. As Tiffany puts it, "HappySignals empowered us to unify our support teams with an end-to-end approach."

The results (from 2024 data)

Incident NPS rose to 83, with average perceived lost time dropping from 4h 56m to 3h 22m
Request NPS climbed to 88, with average lost time nearly halved — from almost 5 hours to under 3
Even with a portal experience they knew needed work, feedback let the team prioritize the right fixes ahead of a planned ServiceNow upgrade
"IT is usually remembered for what breaks. But with this, we can finally celebrate what works." — Feisar Joya, Manager, Service Management Office, ANU

CUSTOMER CASE: NESTLÉ

Scaling human-centric IT to 275,000 employees

The organization Nestlé is one of the world's largest food and beverage companies, with over 275,000 employees interacting daily with a vast network of IT systems and services.

ITSM runs on ServiceNow with an internal service desk. HappySignals has been in place since December 2022.

The challenge Nestlé's IT had a clear ambition, in the words of Osvaldo Santos, Senior Global Product Manager at Nestlé: to be recognized as a business partner, not a back-office function.

That meant delivering an IT service experience on par with the best consumer technology and proving its value to the business with something more than process metrics.

What they did Nestlé secured executive alignment first, with CIO-backed, measurable goals for IT experience. It partnered with HappySignals to measure satisfaction across IT services, then created a global, cross-functional Experience Management Office.

The idea behind it was to be able to coordinate efforts, share best practices, and localize improvements region by region.

Underpinning it all was a deliberate shift from project management to product management; IT services that keep evolving with employee needs rather than one-off deliveries.

The results

The experience initiative now reaches 80% of Nestlé's markets worldwide, with the remaining 20% targeted next
Real-time feedback enabled proactive fixes, including resolving Wi-Fi connectivity issues for a Northeast Asian team directly from employee feedback
Internal benchmarking turned individual wins into shared playbooks, spreading improvement across regions
Combining experience data with technical data gave teams a fuller, more actionable view of service performance

"Nestlé's IT has a clear goal. We want to be recognized as a business partner in our organization." — Osvaldo Santos, Senior Global Product Manager, Nestlé

The Practical Guide to XLAs