How to operationalize experience level agreements without turning them into vanity metrics
IT service management has treated SLAs like the scoreboard for decades. Tickets closed on time. Response windows met. Mean time to resolve trending down. On paper, everything looks healthy. Then a user says, “I lost half a day to this!” That is the gap XLAs are trying to close.
An experience level agreement is not a replacement for operational discipline. It is an attempt to measure what users actually experience, then use that measurement to improve the services that create friction. The danger is that XLAs can drift into feel good theater. If they are vague, hard to verify, or disconnected from action, they turn into vanity metrics. The goal is simple. Keep SLAs for minimum commitments. Add XLAs to optimize for momentum.
What SLAs do well, and what they miss
SLAs are excellent at defining minimum service expectations. They protect customers and they help IT plan staffing, capacity, and priorities. They also create consistency. When you say “P1 incidents get a response in 15 minutes,” everyone understands the rule.
The problem is that SLAs mostly measure compliance to a process target. Users experience flow. A ticket can be acknowledged on time and still feel like nothing is happening. A ticket can be resolved within target while the user burns hours on workarounds. A service can meet uptime while still being unreliable in the moments that matter, like login, VPN, video calls, or access resets.
SLAs tell you whether you met the contract. They do not always tell you whether the workday was saved.
What XLAs are really measuring
XLAs are about outcomes that users can feel. The key phrase is “can feel,” but the measurement cannot be only feelings. A strong XLA approach uses experience as the lens, and data as the backbone.
A practical way to think about it is this. An XLA is only useful if it answers three things: what good looks like, how you will measure it repeatedly, and what you will do when the experience degrades. If you cannot clearly describe the action that follows the metric, you are collecting trivia.
Why XLAs become vanity metrics
Most vanity metrics fail for the same reason. They look impressive, but they do not help anyone make better decisions.
In XLA land, the usual suspects are broad satisfaction scores with no context, generic post ticket surveys that measure mood more than outcomes, and dashboards full of indices that cannot be tied to a specific service owner and improvement plan. These approaches create reporting, not improvement. They also invite gaming. When a number becomes the goal, people optimize the number, not the experience.
A more disciplined way to operationalize XLAs
The cleanest way to keep XLAs real is to attach them to specific services and specific moments. Not “the employee experience overall.” Not “IT is doing great.” Instead, focus on where experience is won or lost quickly.
Start by naming a few “moments that matter” for each critical service. Monday morning login. Joining a video call. Getting a new device and becoming productive. Resetting MFA without losing an hour. These are not abstract. They are where friction shows up, and where users form their opinion of IT.
Once you have those moments, measure them with a small set of signals that balance each other. This is how you avoid surveys becoming the whole story, and how you avoid operational metrics pretending to be experience.
Operational signals tell you how the work moved through the system. Digital experience signals tell you what the technology actually did on endpoints, networks, and identity paths. User perception signals tell you whether the outcome felt clear and helpful. You need all three, because each one alone can lie to you in its own special way.
What does all of this look like in practice?
Operationally, instead of obsessing over “time to close,” look at “time to restore productivity.” Those are not always the same thing. Track repeat incidents in the same category over the next one to two weeks, because repeat pain is the loudest kind of pain. Pay attention to handoffs, because every handoff is both delay and context loss.
Digitally, use telemetry that maps to those moments. Login latency, SSO failures, VPN reliability, crash rates for key apps, device health that predicts slowdowns. The point is not to build an observability empire. The point is to connect the user’s friction to measurable signals you can fix.
For perception, keep it short and contextual. You do not need a survey after every ticket. You need the right question after the right moment. Two of the most useful questions are blunt and practical: “Were you blocked, slowed, or unaffected?” and “How many minutes did this cost you?” Those answers connect feelings to impact, and impact to prioritization.
Turning experience into XLAs that drive action
An XLA should be narrow enough that someone can own it and improve it. If it is broad enough to sound like a mission statement, it is too broad to manage.
A good example is “restore productivity within 30 minutes for most user impacting P1 incidents.” That forces teams to work backward from the user’s reality. Another is reducing repeat incidents in a specific pain category, like VPN login failures. Another is reducing user effort by limiting handoffs for common request types. These are experience goals, but they are still operationally grounded.
Most importantly, every XLA needs an owner and a trigger. If performance drops below a threshold, something should happen automatically in your operating model. A problem record is opened. A targeted improvement sprint is launched. A knowledge cycle is initiated. A change enablement review is triggered. Without that, XLAs become a pretty dashboard that everyone nods at once a month.
How SLAs and XLAs work together
You do not have to pick a side.
SLAs provide the baseline, the minimum commitments, and the reliability of process. XLAs tell you whether that reliability is translating into momentum for users. When SLAs look green but XLAs trend down, you are efficiently delivering the wrong thing. When XLAs look good but SLAs slip, you may be propping up experience with heroics that are not sustainable. The contrast is useful. It tells you whether you have a process problem, an experience problem, or both.
If you only implement one experience metric, make it this: minutes of productivity lost per incident category. It is measurable. It is hard to argue with. It prioritizes investment better than ticket volume. It also shifts leadership conversations away from “how many did we close” and toward “how much work did we save.”
Bottom Line
Users do not experience IT as tickets. They experience it as momentum or friction. XLAs are how you measure that reality with enough discipline to improve it. Keep them tied to moments that matter. Use a balanced set of signals so you are not fooled by any one metric. Make sure every measure has an owner and an action. That is how experience becomes operational, not theatrical.