Top Tips for Introducing and Adopting ITXM

In today's customer-centric and agile world, IT Experience Management (ITXM) is crucial for organizations striving to deliver the best customer outcomes through understanding and listening to their employees. These organizations and those leading the charge within them have the foresight to see that better employee experiences lead to better customer experiences.

Here's the thing: many organizations struggle to get started with their experience management journey. Often, this leads to them continuing to do what they are already doing: Old fashioned service level agreements (SLAs), CSAT & watermelon metrics. Or, they simply do nothing.

Implementing experience management in your organization may seem daunting, but there are best practices to help you get started and keep the momentum moving forward. Here are some key tips you can use to set yourself up for success in the first year.

*This blog is co-authored by industry authority Rae Ann Bruno and Greg Golding of HappySignals.*

1. A strong champion for experience

To start bringing experience management into your organization, you’ll need at least one strong advocate who understands the value of experience management and wants to see it in the organization. We call this an experience champion or ambassador; this person would lead the charge on experience management and might have a small tiger team or committee helping to move the ball forward. Implementing experience management drives organizational change. Therefore, initial stakeholder buy-in and support is critical.

A good champion for experience management will secure firm buy-in from senior leadership to support and help with the path forward. Securing senior leadership commitment will help secure and grow the initiative throughout the organization.

2. Start Measuring Now – Understand where you are; Set the baseline

Successful experience management's cornerstone is an "outside-in" approach. Don't assume you know what your employees or customers think—ask them. Gather feedback and learn how people genuinely feel about your services, tools, and systems. This initial step will help guide the rest of your experience management efforts.

Your first goal should be understanding what your employees feel today- specifically about the IT services and applications being provided. This means going beyond transactional data to gather sentiment data and personal insights. This will give you a baseline understanding of how your employees feel today

3. Evangelize Experience Across the Organization

In any effective experience management practice, a key component is transparency. Once you start gathering data, share your insights widely. You can start by sharing the data among the tiger team and IT leaders. As the program progresses, you will share findings, wins, improvements and initiatives across the wider business and back to the end-user employees. This will help drive a more positive culture where employees can see improvements based on feedback they've given. This helps build transparency and leads to more qualitative feedback from end users over time.

4. Go Beyond Traditional SLA Metrics – A Comprehensive View

Many organizations today think tracking service level compliance and customer satisfaction is enough to measure employee experience. But here's the catch: these metrics often focus only on support transactions and represent just a small slice of the employee population. They fail to capture the broader feelings and perceptions of all employees.

This leads to what's known as the "watermelon effect." On the surface, everything looks good—our SLAs may be "green," indicating we're meeting our targets. Yet underneath, the reality can be quite different, with employees feeling "red" due to dissatisfaction. This disconnect can lead to frustrations, workarounds, and disengagement among staff. While SLA compliance and operational metrics are essential, understanding employee sentiment is crucial. By combining sentiment data with operational metrics, organizations can gain a more complete picture of the employee experience, helping to uncover the reasons behind how employees genuinely feel and allowing you to take action on actionable insights.

5. Build Toward XLAs (Experience Level Agreements)

Once you’ve collected and analyzed sentiment and identified other data sets that impact experience, you’re ready to develop your first Experience Level Agreement (XLA).

Your outside-in approach to collecting and analyzing sentiment data will reveal the experience(s) you need to improve. It’s essential to align the operational and technical data that impacts that experience in your XLA. Recognize that XLAs are not tied to transactions and are sent to all organization employees over a year (or six months).

This diagram reflects the alignment of X, O, and T data and lays the foundation for developing XLAs.

Getting started with one XLA is sufficient in your first year. In fact, beginning with an XLA based on sentiment alone could be your starting point before maturing and aligning O and T data with the sentiment.

Conclusion: Start Somewhere, Stay Flexible

Embracing IT Experience Management can transform how an enterprise understands and adapts to its employee's technology needs. Ultimately, ITXM is a journey on which you should start slowly.

ITXM should not be compared to "changing the world"; keep it simple! Moving beyond traditional metrics to include sentiment data allows decision-makers and leaders to make more actionable decisions based on their employees' feelings, setting the stage for meaningful Experience Level Agreements .

In future articles, we'll take a closer look at each of the steps outlined above, helping you refine your approach to experience management. The journey to a better experience starts with a strong supporter, actionable insights, and the willingness to embrace change.

To learn more about IT experience management, please take a look at our ITXM Framework.

*This blog is co-authored by industry authority Rae Ann Bruno and Greg Golding of HappySignals.*