Use experience-level agreements to elevate IT service satisfaction

Imagine that you and a friend go to a beautiful restaurant and the server comes over—not with a menu, a glass of water, and a cheery welcome, but with a service-level agreement (SLA) containing 25 key performance indicators (KPIs) that the restaurant intends to meet over the course of the next hour.

The server goes on to explain that for the service to work in line with the SLA, you, the customer, can request only one modification to the menu as presented unless you had made the request at the time of the reservation.

How would you respond? I am guessing you'd be bewildered.

Likewise, consider that most IT service organizations today exist—with a considerable amount of cost and effort—to measure and report data. But how much of that data is relevant to anyone using the service organization's service?

SLAs dominate our IT service management teams, our sourcing contracts, and our underpinning arrangements—agreements that support the SLA. Meanwhile, customer approval scores have barely budged; the average customer satisfaction with service desks, or outsourcing suppliers, hasn't significantly improved since the introduction of SLAs and KPIs. I am not saying that SLAs have no place; they do, just not at the front of the house.

Measuring what you can is not the same as doing what you must. It's time for a change. It's time to pivot from managing IT services to managing the consumer's experience of IT with experience-level agreements (XLAs).

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Is your service desk ready to be measured?

If your business had to pay for its IT services would they pay for your Service Desk or would they look externally and pay a third party to deliver this service?


It’s a very competitive space we now operate in and having the ability to prove to your business that you are delivering services to industry recognised targets is a great way to stay ahead of the competition.  Whether you plan to go down the accreditation route such as an ISO standard or the Service Desk Institute Certification programmed or simply deliver excellence outside of these schemes its important to have a benchmark to base your goals around.


Service desks typically provide services based on core ITIL processes. These vary from process to process, an understanding of how and why you should create these processes and being prepared to be measured against these sends out a big statement.


Service Management Managers have to ensure their teams are aligned and share the vision and passion that is required to be held up and counted. By having clear and measurable objectives your team will be able to see the vision and understand the steps that need to be collectively taken to reach the final goal. Motivated and target driven staff will stay focused and strive to deliver quality service time after time.

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How to Build an Effective IT Service Desk

Building an effective IT service desk is not easy. With technology evolving so quickly, with companies reliant on a complex mix of hardware, software, cloud-solutions, broadband, telephony and legacy systems, you need an IT help desk that can provide support and proactively grow the business.

An effective IT service desk can do so much more than fix your email when it goes down. For it to deliver great service – both supportive and proactive – your help desk analysts need a range of skills and solutions to operate smoothly. Remember, without IT help desk support; business can’t function. Digital systems, from cloud-storage to communications keep businesses operational.

Systems and hardware determine the support desk skills you need. And of course, larger companies and those whose business is technology – such as tech companies – need more support. So, although it’s somewhat difficult to outline the specific skills your team need, know that an effective IT help desk requires at least one member of staff with the right skills/experience, at a minimum.

Next, you need to consider the systems they use to run the IT service desk…

#1: Online Ticketing

Internal customers don’t always want to make a call. An online ticketing system is essential. It also makes it easier to log and track issues, then prioritize them against everything the service help desk is trying to solve right now.

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