Water Melons & ServiceNow - Making sense of XM

** The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer **

Summer is peaking out here in India and there are watermelons all around. Green outside and red inside. Is that how your service is? Then read on!

About 10 months or so, one of the leaders of a leading G10 partner asked me if ServiceNow has anything on Experience Level Agreement (XLA). That was the first time, I came across this concept of Experience Management (XM) and I did some preliminary research and found a few apps related to XLAs on the ServiceNow store. I left my research at that and didn’t think about it till ServiceNow’s recent announcement of its partnership with Qualtrics. Now I knew, I had to learn more.

This blog is an attempt to summarize my learning on XM, XLA, and how the ServiceNow + Qualtrics partnership will help our customers.

In a HBR article on the experience economy, I saw a model that shows the progression of economic value.

The key takeaway here was that the next competitive battleground for leading companies is in building experiences

PC:https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy

With this understanding, I was looking for a framework that would help me understand how does one bring some kind of measure to the context of services and experiences.

Borrowing from the communication industry’s framework of Quality of Experience, one can visualize that while the Quality of Service covers the context of the Service Provider and the applications the Quality of Experience also includes the context of the user.

The below table summarizes the differences between QoS & QoE as well as SLAs & XLAs

Is your service a melon ? Watermelons are green on the outside and red in the middle. Focusing solely on traditional SLAs can indicate the skin of your service is green. But what if when you cut that service open, the user satisfaction is in the red?

Using SLAs and XLAs together gives organizations a more holistic way to measure service excellence. To do this, operational data from Enterprise Service Management platforms like ServiceNow needs to be combined with experience data from Experience Management platforms like Qualtrics.

Imagine a multiplex chain that hosts various kinds of movies – operational data (O Data) as it pertains to the chain include footfalls ( at different times), sale of popcorn, etc. This gives a limited view to the multiplex chain owner. What kind of movie does movie goer A like is the experience data ( X Data) that is relevant in this case. Experience management is about combining O-data and X-data to ensure that every business decision is based on both hard facts and soft intangibles.

Here are a few use cases from the Qualtrics website that demonstrate the value of XM.

• By taking a deep dive into passengers’ feedback in Philadelphia, JetBlue was able to trace dissatisfaction to the lack of airport shops and amenities open early in the morning. JetBlue responded quickly by simply passing out water, juice, and coffee at the gate to boost customer morale.
• In a separate airport, JetBlue noticed negative comments and a lower NPS at gate A18. They dug in and found the terminal speaker was broken and passengers couldn’t hear what the gate agent was saying. With Qualtrics, JetBlue sent an automated alert to the airport maintenance crew and it was fixed the same day. Scores went back up.

It is imperative that in the Experience Economy, companies pay attention to what Maya Angelou once said: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Hopefully you find this blog interesting. Here are some resources that you may find useful:

1. https://timoelliott.com/blog/2019/01/what-is-experience-management.html
2. https://www.happysignals.com/the-practical-guide-to-experience-level-agreements-xlas
3. https://martin.varela.fi/pdf/varela-qoe-fi-2015.pdf
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crk5FDMFdIE&t=3s
5. https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy#
6. https://giarte.com/uploads/GI_PN9484_Digital-Empathy-ENG_binnenwerk_def.pdf