SLAs Are Table Stakes. What’s Your Experience Strategy?
Why performance metrics alone aren’t enough — and how to deliver outcomes that actually matter.
By Incountr
In the world of IT and business services, hitting the SLA used to be the gold standard.
Response times? ✅
System uptime? ✅
Resolution windows? ✅
On paper, everything looks green. But in practice, your customers and employees are still frustrated. Support feels clunky. Service experiences feel like a maze. And productivity is quietly suffering.
Why? Because SLAs are no longer a differentiator — they’re the bare minimum. In today’s experience-driven economy, the winners are those who go beyond transactional service and focus on how people feel when interacting with technology, teams, and tools.
It’s time to shift your focus from SLAs to something more powerful: an experience strategy.
✅ SLAs: A Useful Tool, Not the Full Picture
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a set of defined performance metrics: response times, resolution times, system availability, etc. They ensure technical accountability and are vital for service contracts and internal service delivery.
But here’s the problem: SLAs measure activity, not satisfaction.
Just because a ticket is resolved “on time” doesn’t mean it was handled well. If it took three transfers, conflicting information, and poor communication, the experience was still painful — regardless of SLA compliance.
Common SLA pitfalls:
Green dashboards, red reality: You’re meeting SLAs, but user complaints are rising.
Watermelon metrics: Everything looks good from the outside, but it’s all red underneath.
Misalignment with business value: SLAs reward speed, not impact.
SLA-centric reporting can create a false sense of success. What you can measure isn’t always what matters most.
💡 The Missing Piece: Experience-Level Agreements (XLAs)
Enter Experience-Level Agreements (XLAs) — a more modern, human-centric way to define and measure service success.
Where SLAs focus on outputs, XLAs focus on outcomes. They look at what it’s like to actually receive a service — not just how quickly it was delivered.
Key differences:
An XLA doesn’t replace SLAs — it complements them. Together, they give a holistic picture of service health: how it performs and how it feels.
🧠 Why Experience Strategy Matters to the Business
Focusing solely on technical metrics leaves blind spots that can seriously damage productivity, morale, and brand equity.
Poor service experiences lead to:
Employee disengagement: Clunky systems and frustrating support reduce satisfaction and increase turnover.
Shadow IT: People seek workarounds, undermining governance and creating risk.
Customer churn: Inconsistent or impersonal experiences erode trust and loyalty.
Transformation drag: Poor experience slows adoption of new tools or processes.
On the flip side, organizations that optimize for experience see real business benefits:
Higher productivity and morale
Faster adoption of digital initiatives
Stronger cross-functional collaboration
Better alignment with customer needs
🧭 Building Your Experience Strategy: A Practical Framework
A strong experience strategy doesn’t happen by accident — it’s intentional. Here’s how to build one that aligns with your business and user needs.
1. Start with Empathy and Insight
You can’t improve what you don’t understand. Go beyond metrics and gather human insight.
Map user journeys: Where are the friction points?
Conduct interviews and surveys: What do people really think about your services?
Listen to frontline teams: They know where the gaps are.
Use sentiment analysis tools: Combine qualitative and quantitative insight.
The goal: uncover what matters most to your users, not just what’s easiest to measure.
2. Define Clear Experience Outcomes
Once you understand what users value, translate that into outcomes.
Some examples:
“I can get help without bouncing between teams.”
“I feel informed throughout the service process.”
“I can focus on my work without tech disruptions.”
Then turn these into measurable experience goals.
💡 Pro tip: Use simple language. If your CEO or frontline worker can’t understand your outcome metric, it’s too complex.
3. Blend SLAs and XLAs for Full-Fidelity Service Management
Don’t ditch SLAs — they still matter. But layer XLAs on top to provide a richer, people-centric view.
A modern service scorecard might include:
Response time (SLA)
First contact resolution rate (SLA)
Satisfaction score after resolution (XLA)
User-reported effort score (XLA)
Average number of touchpoints per issue (XLA)
This combo allows you to balance speed with quality, and volume with value.
4. Make Experience a Shared Responsibility
Experience isn't just an IT problem — it's a cultural shift.
Engage cross-functional teams: HR, Operations, Facilities, Digital.
Create shared KPIs: Align teams on the same outcomes.
Empower service owners: Give them the tools and data to improve the experience, not just meet deadlines.
Educate leadership: Show them how experience drives retention, productivity, and innovation.
5. Measure What Matters
Experience measurement is evolving — but here are some high-value metrics to track:
🔹 Experience Metrics:
Net Promoter Score (NPS): “Would you recommend this service?”
Customer Effort Score (CES): “How easy was it to get what you needed?”
Employee Experience Score (EXS): Holistic view of workplace satisfaction.
Time to Productivity: Especially for onboarding or new system rollouts.
🔹 Behavior Metrics:
Ticket reopen rates
Escalation frequency
Use of self-service options
🔹 Sentiment Metrics:
Keywords in comments
AI-driven sentiment analysis
“Voice of the customer” heatmaps
Remember: It’s not about choosing one metric. It’s about using a balanced scorecard to see the full picture.
⚠️ Common Experience Strategy Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)
Even with the best intentions, many organizations stumble. Here are a few pitfalls to watch for:
❌ Measuring activity, not outcomes
Focusing only on tickets closed or uptime hides what users really feel.
❌ Over-relying on surveys
Surveys help, but they aren’t the full story. Supplement with behavior data and qualitative insight.
❌ Lack of executive buy-in
Experience strategies require cultural and operational change. Without leadership support, it becomes a side project.
❌ Treating XLAs like SLAs
XLAs aren’t rigid targets. They’re directional and dynamic — they evolve with user expectations.
📈 Real-World Example: XLAs in Action
A multinational enterprise IT team consistently hit 99.9% uptime and <1-hour ticket responses. But their internal surveys showed employee frustration.
Upon review, they found:
Frequent ticket bouncing between teams
Poor communication during resolution
Inconsistent handoffs and closure delays
By introducing XLAs focused on satisfaction, communication clarity, and resolution ownership:
Employee satisfaction scores rose by 28%
Tickets resolved at first contact improved by 35%
Support escalations dropped by 40%
Lesson: Hitting the SLA didn’t matter if the experience was poor. But when they optimized for experience, performance improved everywhere.
🏁 Final Thoughts: Compete on Experience, Not Just Performance
You can’t win in a modern service environment by simply “checking the box.” Meeting SLAs is important, but it’s no longer enough.
The organizations thriving today are those that focus on how services are delivered, not just if they are delivered.
An experience strategy:
Centers on outcomes, not just outputs
Aligns teams across silos
Builds trust with users and employees
Drives real transformation success
The question isn’t whether you’re hitting your SLAs. It’s whether your customers and employees feel supported, empowered, and satisfied.