If you and your company are losing out on growth prospects while your customers are going to your competitors, chances are that you may be committing some or all of these bad Experience Level Agreement (XLA) practices. In a conversation with Unisys Digital Workplace Deep Dive, Bright Horse Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer Neil Keating listed down 4 XLA bad practices that may adversely impact your end-users’ experience.
Here are the 4 XLA Bad Practices That Prevent Great End-User Experience:
Uncontrolled IT Service Management Structure
Business owners are often excited about experience management because they’re really interested in the topic. They want to learn the art and science behind it. They wish to know how they can improve their employees’ or customers’ experience of IT services. Such enthusiasm is great to have. However, you’ve got to get the basic building blocks in place. You must make sure you are level three control against the Capability Maturity Model. If you don’t do that, you’re building your foundations on sand.
Unexpected Behavioural Issues With Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
If you already have a proper ITSM structure in place and are in complete control of it, the next major bad practice that you may be committing would be to install SLAs or KPIs (key performance indicators) that may have caused unexpected behavioural issues that could compromise your company’s productivity level.
For instance, while running a problem-solving service desk, setting a 15-minute time limit on your employees to solve a customer’s problem, may be one such KPI. What is the objective of setting your service desk? Do you want the customer to have a quick response time? Or would you be rather fine with them waiting a few minutes longer with a higher chance of their tickets being resolved?
Depending On ITSM Tools For Experience Management:
Without a doubt, there are some very good tools that can help you collect and secure digital experience data through models such as sentiment surveys. However, there is no tool in the world that will solve your entire problem of experience management. What the tools can do is provide you data and provide you information and point you in the right direction and tell you where experience may be a problem. It can’t resolve the experience for you.
Ask two fundamental questions: What is the tool telling you? And what are we going to do about that?
Tools cannot be the complete answer, you have to have process changes, you have to have cultural changes around that to make sure that you’re getting the right data from the tool, and you’re responding to the right patterns within the tool.
Underestimating The Experience Management Office (XMO)
A company needs to show that the Experience Management Office is at a senior level for it to be taken seriously. If the experience management office is too low down on organization, it will just become a data repository. You need to raise the XMO up and out from the operations.
Often, it’s completely separate from the Service Management Office. It has to be a separate department within it that is focused on measuring and managing experience in order to achieve the objectives. Organisations need to have someone senior in the XMO that can corral other departments and say ‘we have identified some issues and we need to work together with you to solve those issues.
Check out Neil Keating’s complete podcast with Weston Morris (Unisys Director Global Strategy – Digital Workplace Services).
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