By Chidambaram Ganapathi, Associate Vice President and Practice Head, Digital Workplace Services, Infosys
Today’s consumers are hard taskmasters, unwilling to settle for merely acceptable service and experience. And they’re bringing the same expectations to work, highlighting the need for new thinking in employee services and support. This article takes that thought forward in the context of internal IT Services Management (ITSM).
SLAs not enough
Thus far, service agreements between providers and clients have been governed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) stipulating parameters such as ticket volume, uptime, response & resolution time, etc. and the penalties for non-compliance. By definition, SLAs are reactive and cover only the bare minimum service deliverables – whether the need was met (or not) and the time it took – without considering the quality of experience. For that reason, SLA metrics are (sometimes) associated with a “watermelon effect”, appearing green because the ticket was closed, but red underneath because of unsatisfactory customer experience that was never part of the evaluation.
In internal IT Services Management (employee tech support), SLAs are proving inadequate for meeting rising employee expectations for a seamless and consistently positive work experience. Since employee experience drives employee engagement and therefore, business performance, organisations need to factor it into service evaluation by replacing SLAs with Experience Level Agreements (XLAs).
Enter XLAs
Still undergoing evolution, an Experience Level Agreement formalises a commitment to provide a certain level of experience (in this case) by IT services to employees. While XLAs can take different forms, they all seek to enable a defined, measurable, and therefore improvable, experience. As opposed to SLAs that measure performance on technical metrics, XLAs prioritise a range of experience measures, such as satisfaction, emotional engagement, and feedback quality. Importantly, XLAs are proactive, seeking to anticipate issues to fix them quickly or prevent them altogether, and aspiring to not just meet, but exceed expectations.
XLAs use outcome-based metrics to prioritise the quality of interaction, identify factors driving satisfaction, and assess the effectiveness of tech services in enabling employees to achieve their desired results. A continuous feedback loop employing user surveys, sentiment analysis and built-in experience monitoring tools helps the organisation to detect and fix problems, and progressively improve service experience. While this marks a welcome shift to a user-centric approach, it presents certain challenges, such as establishing the right foundational XLA metrics, converting measured data into actionable insights, and deciding what tools to use.
AI, the X factor in XLAs
Artificial Intelligence can help in all of the above. Organisations can leverage AI-powered tools to gather a variety of data from employee interactions across channels – for example, sentiment from social media posts, pain points from calls to the helpdesk, suggestions from feedback forms, and so on – to measure quality of experience, make improvements as required, and refine their understanding of the metrics that matter the most to employees. IT staff can leverage the real-time insights and recommendations of AI to make faster, fully informed decisions, which is especially useful in complex problem situations. AI can also predict if there will be a sudden demand for a certain service – for example, a request for software patches from all users of the same operating system – giving the IT team adequate time to plan capacity and provision resources.
The list of AI use cases in ITSM has expanded with the arrival of generative AI, which can, for example, create automated responses to tickets and queries to enable immediate resolution; identify patterns from past data to predict problems early to minimise service disruption; and continually build a knowledge base by adding the latest information and trends. Generative AI assistants, such as sidekicks and copilots, can instantly retrieve relevant information to provide real-time support to tech staff or even execute certain ITSM functions autonomously. What’s more, employees can describe the problems they are facing to generative AI using their natural language, and the system will not only interpret the information and raise a ticket, but also offer a solution or route the ticket to someone in the IT service team. From self-service support and desktop automation to automated code review and remediation to L1 triaging and troubleshooting, generative AI can enable it all to enhance user experience.
It must be noted that XLAs complement SLAs, and by enabling organisations to consider employee experience in addition to technical metrics, cultivate user-centricity and engagement to eventually drive better business performance.
