Rae Ann Bruno on Introducing User Experience Into Service

In what almost seems like a bygone era, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) used to carry considerably more weight with both customers and service providers. Over the years, the use of SLAs as accurate barometers of service has fallen dramatically, as they don’t necessarily reflect the lived experience of customers.

This represents a shift in the perception of what used to be one of the key metrics by how service, and thus the user experience, used to be measured. How does it affect employee retention and customer loyalty?

Enter Experience Level Agreements, or XLAs, which represent a more accurate way to find opportunities and gaps in services and products. This new paradigm gives IT support teams the framing and understanding required to better understand what people want and deliver it. 

This topic is explored on the fourth episode of Ticket Volume, a new podcast where InvGate Product Specialist Matt Beran speaks with IT leaders to explore their views on service management, technology, and business. In episode four, Matt speaks with Rae Ann Bruno, who has been training and spreading the gospel of Experience Management.

Rae Ann says:

There's a concept that we talk about called "moments over time." And it's the fact that, especially as IT, we tend to take this transactional approach. "How was this incident?" "How was this request?" "Did we hit our targets?" And if you look across IT, "did we hit our availability targets?" So, we do this, and we're just very siloed, and we're not looking end-to-end at the overall experience, and that the way people feel is not about one transaction. It's based on multiple transactions and they just start to have a feeling about it, or they're disgruntled, or, you know, they'll go around those processes, or go complain to somebody. 

Rae Ann Bruno has over 15 years of management experience, with an emphasis on process re-engineering, employee development, and business alignment of IT services. She's a consultant and trainer in various areas of ITIL, knowledge-centered service, service desk improvement, communications, internal marketing, metrics, and ITIL process improvement. Rae Ann is currently the President of Business Solutions Training, Inc.

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