How does your IT organization assess IT service quality? If it’s like most IT organizations, it likely has service level agreements (SLAs) with associated service-level targets (which, just to confuse things, are likely also called “SLAs”). Meeting these service-level targets indicates that the organization’s IT service quality is sufficient. But sufficient for whom?
It’s a “can of worms” that needs to be opened to better assess IT service quality in 2024. This blog explains why.
What is service quality?
Let’s start with some basics. If you look online for a definition of quality, Google offers something like “the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.” But who is measuring the standard or the degree of excellence? Google also states that service quality is “a measure of how well a company meets customer expectations for its services.” Again, who is deciding the “how well”?
In the case of IT services and IT service quality, the measures employed in assessing IT service quality are usually IT-created SLAs. Some business colleagues might have been involved in their creation in the distant past, but they’re really IT’s measures. It’s likely that the SLAs aren’t a suitable indicator of IT service quality, at least not from the employee or end-user perspective. We’ll return to this after looking at the IT SLA status quo.
The IT SLA status quo
Most IT organizations assess IT service quality using a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. These are usually included in SLAs (the documents) and provide monthly insights into performance, user satisfaction, and service effectiveness.
The quantitative metrics likely include:
- Incident and request volumes, response and resolution times, and first-contact resolution (FCR) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) metrics for the IT service desk
- Uptime and availability for IT service delivery
- Change success rates for change management (or change enablement in ITIL 4)
Organizations may also use similar quantitative service-level targets for other capabilities and a key qualitative metric – customer or user satisfaction. The most popular use case being regular surveys to capture user satisfaction following IT support interactions.
Some forward-thinking IT organizations might also assess the business impact of their services, such as the financial impact of service outages or degraded performance (likely caused by major incidents) on business operations. Fewer still might evaluate how their IT services contribute to business objectives, perhaps to gauge the “business value” of IT.
However, these metrics, and others that might be employed, usually reflect the IT organization’s view of IT service quality, not that of the people who consume the IT services – employees or end-users.
The volume of incident tickets is a good example.
Playing Devil’s Advocate with SLA targets
I always think measuring the volume of incident tickets is a futile measure of IT service quality. Think about the following.
What does it mean if your IT service desk handles more tickets this month than last? On the one hand, it could mean that the quality of IT services has declined, with more end-user issues requiring IT support. Alternatively, it could simply mean that more end-users feel happy to contact the IT service desk with their issues, and the quality of IT services could have improved despite the rise in contacts. So, what does it mean when you measure and report ticket volume trends? Even when viewed with customer satisfaction scores.
However, the unfortunate reality could be that IT leadership is purely interested in the number, based on their thinking, “We’ve handled 5% more tickets this month than last; the IT service desk is doing a great job.” While the business perception is more likely to be closer to “You’ve handled 5000 incident tickets this month? That’s 5000 times your IT services have adversely affected employee productivity.”
It’s a classic example of IT SLAs focusing on the “mechanics” of IT service delivery and support rather than the business outcomes IT capabilities facilitate, with the latter surely a better indicator of IT service quality.
The industry view of IT service delivery and support is changing, so must that of IT service quality
The IT world, and particularly IT service management (ITSM), is increasingly focused on IT’s value and the experiences it delivers. In both instances, IT organizations seek to measure what they achieve rather than simply what they do. This has led to the adoption of experience level agreements (XLAs), with the term “XLA” again representing the associated performance measures (or experience-level targets) and not just the “agreement document.”
These XLA metrics gauge how well IT services help or hinder employees performing their jobs. An example is the two key IT support metrics HappySignals customers employ for ticket handling:
- Employee happiness with their IT support experience
- The employee’s perceived level of lost time.
The HappySignals Global IT Experience Benchmark report provides more on these and other IT experience management (ITXM) measures. However, the critical point to appreciate about them is that they provide the employee perspective of IT performance. Importantly, they’re also a better indicator of IT service quality than the currently employed basket of SLA metrics.
IT service quality assessment must move from what IT thinks is happening to what employees or end-users think. So, please ensure that when your IT organization moves to XLAs, it isn’t merely the adoption of one of the latest ITSM trends – perhaps to tick a box. Instead, make XLAs the backbone of IT service quality assessment, recognizing that what IT service quality means in 2024 and beyond needs to change.
Your organization’s employees and end-users need to be the primary bellwether of IT service quality, not the two-decade-old SLA metrics that likely hide the issues employees are experiencing with IT service delivery and support. It’s time to think about IT service quality differently!
To learn more about using XLAs for IT service quality assessment, please get in touch with HappySignals.
