Why IT leaders are eyeing XLAs to enhance employee experience

For decades, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have held IT teams accountable to measurable targets—respond within an hour, resolve within four hours—but they miss the bigger picture: was it a good experience?

Employees aren’t worried about whether you met your resolution-time target, they care if they had to reach out multiple times to get a response. Or if a major project they were working on ground to a halt while they had to wait for a fix.

That’s why more IT leaders are beginning to look beyond SLAs for a way to measure what actually matters—whether an experience felt seamless, empowering, and frustration-free. In fact, 87% of IT leaders agree that experience-focused metrics make it easier to understand where support needs to improve.

By evolving from purely technical benchmarks to more human-centered outcomes, employee service management is entering a new phase. One that directly aligns IT with productivity, engagement, and business value. At Zendesk, we see Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) as a critical part of this transformation.

Why traditional SLAs aren’t enough

SLAs were designed for an era when IT services were centralized, predictable, and mostly technical. They worked well for measuring whether the service desk hit its targets, but they fall short in today’s hybrid, AI-powered workplaces.

On paper, a three-hour ticket resolution might look like a win. In practice, it doesn’t capture the lost productivity of an employee who couldn’t do their job during that time. A ticket marked “resolved within SLA” can still leave someone frustrated if communication was poor or the fix didn’t actually solve their issue. And while dashboards light up green, none of them reveal the lasting impression employees carry about how supported—or unsupported—they felt.

That’s where XLAs come in. By focusing on the human side of service—how employees feel and perform when interacting with IT and other shared services—IT leaders can finally see the bigger picture. This includes:

• Satisfaction: Are employees happy with the support they received?
• Effort: Was the process easy, or did they encounter friction?
• Business impact: Did the service allow employees to return to work faster and with fewer disruptions?

XLAs aren’t meant to replace SLAs; they complement them. Together, they provide both the operational benchmarks and the experiential insights needed to deliver better support.

The XLA advantage for businesses

The payoff for adopting XLAs is clear: happier, more productive employees. Organizations already using them report not only higher employee satisfaction, but also measurable gains in performance. When people feel supported, they spend less time wrestling with IT issues and more time contributing to the business.

These impacts go beyond day-to-day efficiency. Employees who consistently receive responsive, empathetic support are also more likely to stick around. In our latest IT research, Zendesk found that 88% of employees feel more valued when support is fast and reliable. And 80% say that having consistently strong IT support is a reason to stay in place. That means XLAs are also helping to protect talent and reduce costly turnover.

For IT leaders, this creates a powerful new mandate. With XLAs, they can:

• Quantify experience-driven productivity: Track the impact of service interactions on employee time-to-productivity, a far better measure than raw ticket volume.
• Link IT outcomes to business outcomes: Demonstrate how improvements in experience correlate with reduced turnover, faster innovation, and stronger customer outcomes.
• Build executive credibility: Present metrics that resonate with the C-suite—employee engagement, retention, and productivity, not just system availability.

Putting XLAs into practice: 6 tips for IT leaders

Getting started with XLAs doesn’t mean tearing down what’s already in place. Instead, it’s about expanding the playbook—layering experience-driven insights on top of existing performance metrics. By starting small and focusing on the moments that matter most to employees, IT leaders can gradually build a foundation where experience becomes as measurable, and as meaningful, as operational efficiency.

Here’s where to begin:

1. Start with experience mapping:

   Chart the end-to-end employee journey across IT services, onboarding, accessing applications, resolving issues, and offboarding. Identify “moments that matter” where experience has the highest impact.

2. Define experience metrics cross-functionally:

   Employee experience cuts across IT, HR, facilities and beyond. Creating XLAs together puts the employee at the center and enables your business to look at experiences holistically. Examples include:

   • Employee Satisfaction (ESAT)

   • Employee Effort Score (ease of getting help)

   • Time to Productivity (how quickly an employee is back to work)

   • Sentiment analysis from surveys, Slack/Teams interactions, or AI-driven text analysis

3. Set XLAs around outcomes, not outputs:

   Instead of “Resolve 90% of tickets in 4 hours,” an XLA might be:

   • “90% of employees rate their IT experience as effortless.”

   • “85% of employees report being back to full productivity within one hour of issue resolution.”

4. Build cross-functional ownership:

   Employee experience cuts across IT, HR, facilities, and beyond. Form a governance group that includes HR, Communications, and Operations leaders to align XLAs with organizational priorities.

5. Use continuous feedback loops:

   Establish real-time voice-of-employee channels and leverage AI-driven sentiment analysis. Integrate feedback into your service improvement lifecycle.

6. Embed XLAs into ITSM and AI workflows:

   Your ITSM platform should provide insight into both SLA and XLA metrics. AI can enrich this further—predicting experience breakdowns, identifying friction points, and suggesting automations that reduce effort.

Turning metrics into meaning

This evolution marks a profound shift in how IT leaders measure success. While quick resolutions are still important, equally so is ensuring that employees feel supported, empowered, and able to do their best work. By embracing XLAs, IT organizations can elevate their role: not simply keeping systems running, but actively shaping a better workplace.

At Zendesk, we believe the future of employee service lies where technology and empathy intersect. Our mission is to help IT leaders make this shift—from tracking SLAs that measure activity to achieving XLAs that capture impact. With the right tools and approach, IT can become a catalyst for productivity, engagement, and long-term business success.