March 22, 2021 - 897 views
|To keep up with the full set of employee experience expectations, IT should use XLAs, which measure end-user productivity and satisfaction.
In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises are driving their digital roadmaps to provide employees with secure and continuous access to IT resources, from anywhere and at any time. To do this well, the IT infrastructure must always be “on.” However, the actual employee experience goes well beyond having IT resources accessible without disruption.
In addition to continuous accessibility, IT must also consider other end-user IT expectations, such as application speed, proactive support, request fulfillment time, resolution and change management when new digital technologies are introduced. To keep up with all these expectations, IT should combine the service level agreements (SLA) that are standard in most business today with a new metric that takes into consideration end-user productivity and satisfaction: experience level agreements (XLA).
XLAs are outcome-focused and seen from the point of view of the end user. By measuring service consumption through a user satisfaction and productivity lens, IT can prioritize service quality and user experience. This is important because as technological dependence increases at most organizations, so does the impact of poor employee experience – a metric that isn’t t accurately captured by SLAs. By using XLAs to customize end-user services, IT can ensure that users are not only happy and productive but also working toward making their organization always-on and agile.
Beyond keeping the lights on
XLAs represent a dramatic shift from quality of service (QoS) to quality of experience (QoE), which positions users at the center. Getting there requires IT to have complete visibility into users’ actual experience in their interactions with all IT products or services. Measuring the quality of the employee experience requires enterprise-class tools that look at metrics across end-user device performance, application response and behavior, as well as accessibility to corporate resources.
We recommend that businesses formulate an experience management office (XMO), whose primary responsibility is to create, maintain, unify and provide beautiful and meaningful experiences by creating and updating XLAs, analyzing, measuring and automating activities, etc. A holistic view of the end-user experience can be gleaned by using various tools, such as Microsoft desktop analytics and other ITSM tools, to collate operational data and experience data.
Operational data can include applications and device performance, response and behavior, and accessibility of corporate resources, while experience data can include survey feedback on devices, survey pop-up notifications following issue resolution, and proactive issue identification. By combining operational and experience data and deriving rich analytics from it, enterprises can shift their support model from SLAs to XLAs and track end users’ quality of experience across the enterprise.
Can’t manage what you can’t measure
The measurement of the employee experience is based on a combination of sentiment analysis with hard data retrieved from the digital workplace across critical applications, collaboration tools and hardware devices. There are two ways to capture experience details:
Making the move to XLAs
Shifting to XLAs can’t be done overnight – it is an ongoing process that will evolve to achieve the desired outcome for all services. Key steps include:
Real-life benefits of XLAs
We helped a large U.S.-based oil and gas client define and deploy user experience-based tools to analyze data based on net promoter score, hard inputs (device, application and network performance metrics) and soft inputs (customer satisfaction and user sentiment scores) by integrating with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. Key outcomes from these XLAs included:
XLAs can help organizations understand their 360-degree digital experience, enabling IT teams to accurately measure and enact continuous improvement.
By shifting from quality of service to quality of experience, organizations can gain more meaningful insights into user experiences that inform major and minor IT infrastructure and/or applications adjustments that allow employees and the business to thrive.
Mortha Venkat Naidu, an Associate Director in Cognizant’s Digital Workplace Services Practice, contributed to this blog.
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