Key Concepts

Question 1

XLA maturity

Answer 1

1. XLA 1.0 sentiment only An XLA that only measures sentiment; i.e., no operational, technical, or other indicators are taken into account. For these XLAs, an organization may design a survey and decide upon experience improvement actions from there.
2. XLA 2.0 multi-data stream An XLA where sentiment and other controlled indicators are taken into account when managing experience.
3. XLA 3.0 persona groups XLA 2.0, spread across different departments/entities, thus ensuring that a more personalized experience can be created for the various persona groups within an organization.

Question 2

XLA Design Methodology

Answer 2

1. Experience now Determining the wants and needs of the people targeted by XLAs; understanding how they feel about the service/product, before reviewing and categorizing them, as well as prioritizing them if needed.
2. XLA ambitions Using the results from step 1 and defining the experience outcome, this stage is where experience ambitions are created. Each ambition created becomes one XLA.
3. Sentiment indicators The process that leads us to understand how sentiment surrounding the XLA will be gathered, mostly likely in the form of a survey.
4. Other experience indicators The process of understanding and gathering relevant O and T data that relates to an XLA. Key to this is picking the right metrics that impact experience.
5. XLA scoring The process of scoring experience within an XLA. This enables you to track changes and improvements over time.
6. Experience reference matrix The XRM enables a line of sight between sentiment and the measures associated with an XLA.

Question 3

Experience Optimization Framework

Answer 3

1. Evangelize We raise awareness of experience and experience management, promoting its use and benefits throughout the organization or to those with the authority to authorize/oversee such a project.
2. Explore We work out our current experience landscape. We determine sentiment and take note of the tools available to assist in this experience management journey.
3. Envision Determining the experience problem area we want to address. This may be apparent from Explore or it may require analysis of current O, T and X data.
4. Enable We create our XLAs, complete with experience ambition and mapped XIs. It is at this stage that we will create our XRM as well, to manage the data points, their relation to ambitions, and to manage experience overall.
5. Execute We arrange the team that will manage experience in the XRMs. This team is called the XMO.
6. Embrace Linked to Execute, Embrace refers to the iterative process the XMO undertakings in sending out the means to gather X data, collecting O and T data, interpreting and, lastly, reporting on any experience concerns/providing recommendations to the relevant individuals or teams.

Question 4

Experience Management Framework

Answer 4

• Business outcomes Noticeable and defined results from work or a project being conducted; for example, increased profitability or employee productivity.
• Experience outcomes Defined results in the experience of those we are targeting with XLAs
• Experience ambitions Statements of intent of the experience that the organization wishes to deliver for stakeholders interacting with a particular service/product. Each statement devised forms an XLA:
• Intrinsic ambition Achieving the expectation that an individual has of an experience.
• Extrinsic ambition Achieving the business value assigned to an experience.
• Controlled experience indicators The sentiment, operational, technical, and other data points used to measure experience for experience ambitions. Because action can be taken to improve them, they are deemed as controllable.
• Uncontrolled experience influencers Factors that influence our experience, over which those providing the experience have no control; for example, weather, family, and political events contributing to a positive or negative mood.
• Experience findings The overall conclusion of experience for an XLA, being generated by
  aggregating X and possibly O and T data together.

Question 5

Evangelize

Answer 5

Inspire your ecosystem

• What is experience?
• Building a movement
• Moments over time
• Experience anticipation
• Experience Management Framework™
• Why does experience matter?

Question 6

Explore

Answer 6

Know where you are
* Experience landscape
* Experience now
* Other experience indicators
* Experience level agreements (XLAs)
* The XLA Stack™

Question 7

Envision

Answer 7

Know where you are going
* Experience ambition
* Range of experiences
* Mapping XLAs to economic values
* The experience economy
* The money value of time
* The staged experience

Question 8

Enable

Answer 8

Create your XLAs
* Types of XLA
* Joint commitments
* Psycho-logic
* XLA design methodology
* The experience reference matrix (XRM)
* What does an XLA look like?
* The role of technology in XLAs
* Bridging versus extending as a strategy.

Question 9

Execute

Answer 9

Put your XLAs into operation
* Collective vs individual experience measurements
* Service management vs experience management
* Defining the XMO
* XMO core responsibilities
* Watermelons, limes, and reverse watermelons
* Where to start
* Communications strategy
* The Güngör model for XLA versus SLA comparison.

Question 10

Embrace

Answer 10

Innovate the experience delivered
* Experience governance
* Experience improvements
* Data collection timings
* The gravity of average performance
* Changing nature of XLAs
* The experience ecosystem.

Question 11

Experience Landscape

Answer 11

• Readiness - Culture, Leadership support, ITSM maturity
• Capability - Process, People and skills, Technology, Resources
• Technology - Sentiment gathering, ITSM, DEX, Dashboarding
• Experience Now - Team meetings, service reviews, social media analysis, Data mining, exit interviews
• Experience Champions - Insightful contacts who can separate the Wants from the Needs within pockets of audience

Question 12

5 economic values

Answer 12

• Commercial - sales and brand awareness
• Productivity - doing more with the same
• Efficiency - providing the same output for less
• Customer - how important/valuable the product/service is to customers
• Future - Enable innovation, future risk reduction, or win future customers

Question 13

Types of XLAs

Answer 13

Internal
* Most common
* Designed for their own employees

Outsourcing
* Comes from external service provider as part of their contract
* Applied to the purchaser’s employees
* These are typically very generic

Internal -> to -> Outsourcing (or vice versa)
* Aims to answer “how does the company feel about working with the outsources?”

Project
* Project-based ambitions

Question 14

Readiness

Key Point 1

Answer 14

Readiness refers to the state to which an organization is prepared to commence an experience management project

Question 15

Capability

Key Point 2

Answer 15

Capability means our ability to see an experience management project through to completion. Readiness reflects our current ability to start an experience project.

Question 16

Experience Now

Key Point 3

Answer 16

Experience now is the current picture of experience that your customers and/or employees
are having at that moment, generated by aggregating various sources of experience data. It
enables experience professionals to understand how the people we want to target with an
experience management project feel about us now.

Question 17

Want vs Need

Key Point 4

Answer 17

You may not be able to give everything that your employees want, but you must provide what
they need to improve experience and see its rewards.

Question 18

XIs other than Sentiment

Key Point 5

Answer 18

Being able to retrieve service performance measures and/or technical measures can help to
provide the ‘why?’ behind the ‘what?’ of sentiment.

Question 19

XLAs

Key Point 6

Answer 19

An experience level agreement (XLA) is a commitment to creating a defined experience.

Question 20

Experience Ambition

Key Point 7

Answer 20

An experience ambition is a statement setting out a defined experience. This is the experience that an organization is trying to stage; the outcome it wants to achieve.

Organizations may have multiple experience ambitions to achieve multiple outcomes, but each defined ambition will become a distinct XLA.

Question 21

Experience Economy

Key Point 8

Answer 21

In the experience economy, people place a strong value on time.

Question 22

Joint Commitments

Key Point 9

Answer 22

Whenever XLAs are put in place in an outsourcing or multi-outsourcing environment, they need to be seen as a joint commitment.

You can outsource experience measures, but it is challenging to completely outsource
experience. Therefore, all parties need to commit to delivering the same ambitions.

Question 23

Psyco-logic

Key Point 10

Answer 23

Through its application of psychology to manipulate experience anticipation, psycho-logic
works to change perceptions to resolve an otherwise unsolvable problem. It creates a sense of control over a situation.

Question 24

Technology Indicates and Enables

Key Point 11

Answer 24

To empower the XLA, experience indicators need to be aligned with the XLA and the technology enabler with the XRM.

Question 25

Extending vs Bridging | Key Point 12

Answer 25

Extending means adding to a tool the ability to measure experience. Bridging refers to the tool’s current ability to combine multiple experience indicators to create a better foundation for staged experience.

Question 26

Experience Measures | Key Point 13

Answer 26

**Collective** Establishing a pattern that can account for the dynamic nature of sentiment. **Individual** The dynamic complexity of how an individual arrives at their sentiment over time.

Question 27

SMO vs XMO | Key Point 14

Answer 27

Service management reports KPI performance periodically and is not responsible for it. The KPIs also do not tend to change. On the other hand, experience management reports experience constantly and is responsible for ensuring that experience ambitions are met. Added to this is the fact that experience changes often, so experience indicators and even ambitions can change.

Question 28

The Gungor Model | Key Point 15

Answer 28

This model also points out that a combined view of XLAs and SLAs is required. XLAs are not here to replace SLAs, but complement them. Where the indices meet and connect, experience professionals can see where ‘what is happening’ meets ‘what it means’. In other words, understanding the why behind the what. For example, if an organization knows it has poor sentiment, it can look at the O data in SLAs and the X data in XI question responses to build an understanding of why people are unhappy with a particular aspect of their experience. Without the context coming from an SLA, an XLA would be able to identify the sentiment, but extra effort would be needed to understand why.

Question 29

Data collection timings | Key Point 16

Answer 29

The XMO needs data continuously to drive improvement. It is recommended to collect data monthly via X data surveys and O and T data gathering. If, however, budgets and resources do not allow for this, consider other frequencies: * If not monthly, then quarterly * If not quarterly, then every six months. Note, however, that too big a gap in data collection will risk missing key experience findings, initiates and predictions. This in turn could lead to XMO failure.