Uncomplicate- What is XLA and why does it matter
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Modern day businesses run on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It is basically a contract between a service provider and customer and defines the service standard that will be provided.
It has metrics like say—response time, resolution, performance metrics, and the likes. SLAs help manage customer expectations. For the customers this provides the basis to do an apples to apples comparison between competing products.
But of late, there has been a new method of gauging a customer’s satisfaction- XLA or eXperience Level Agreement. It brings the attention back on the customer’s experience rather than just cold numbers.
Imagine an agent has provided a service and has been on time, but was maybe rude to the customer while doing so. Does this count as providing a good service, even though the metrics seem fine?
Obviously, no!
Scarlett Bayes, Industry Analyst at The Service Desk Institute, delves into why companies need to take XLAs seriously.
“SLAs establish a typical level of service that a customer should receive. The difference is XLA focuses on customer experience and how the service desk is performing in relation to what the customer is seeing and hearing about the service,”said Scarlett. “There is more to managing the customer experience than meeting targets.”
The idea is to take the traditional SLA metrics and make them more customer centric. For example, instead of saying X number of customer calls were answered (aka call closure rate), shift the goal post to X number of customers were happy with the call.
But, there are also criticisms. Measuring experience is subjective and is not as black and white as the traditional metrics.
The middle ground is to think of every other traditional metric and bring the customer experience angle into it. This would ensure that the end customer is the ultimate winner and that is what every business wants.
This blogpost was co-written by Vignesh Jeyaraman.
