Our dashboards are all green, but our users are still complaining about IT being a "black hole." We are meeting our 4-hour resolution SLAs, but the users feel the process is clunky. How are you guys shifting toward Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)? What specific metrics are you tracking to measure the actual sentiment and productivity impact of your services?
3 answers
We moved away from just measuring "Time to Resolve" and started looking at "Time to Value." We use pulse surveys immediately after a ticket is closed, but we also track "Productivity Loss" by asking the user how long they were unable to work. We’ve found that a ticket resolved in 30 minutes that requires four follow-up emails is viewed much more negatively than a 2-hour resolution that was "one-touch." We now weight our performance scores based on these sentiment metrics rather than just the raw clock time. It’s a culture shift from being "Technically Right" to "User Centric."
This sounds like it could be very subjective. How do you prevent a few "angry" users from ruining your team's performance metrics?
We started tracking 'Self-Service Deflection' quality. It's not just if they didn't call, but if the article actually solved their problem.
Yes! If they don't call but are still frustrated because the help article was outdated, that's a failure in experience even if the 'SLA' looks good.
Brian, subjectivity is actually the point—perception is reality for the user. However, we balance it by looking at trends rather than individual outliers. If one person is always unhappy, that's an anomaly. If 40% of users complain about the same "Standard Change" process, that's a systemic issue we need to fix. We use sentiment analysis on ticket comments to catch these trends automatically, which helps us stay objective about the subjective data.