XLA Design Methodology
XLAs Need a Robust Design
XLAs, like all initiatives, need a strong structure behind their design. Otherwise, they can could collapse before they've taken shape. To ensure as strong a structure as possible, the XLA Design Methodology comes into play. Through the design methodology, organisations ensure that their XLAs are thoroughly understood in terms of what needs to be measured for them before moving ahead with identifying the appropriate indicator data points. Following these steps, organisations ensure that the foundations of their XLAs are cemented before they build them in earnest and see results.
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.
The XRM enables a line of sight between sentiment and the measures associated with an XLA.
The process of scoring experience within an XLA. This enables you to track changes and improvements over time.
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.
The process that leads us to understand how sentiment surrounding the XLA will be gathered, mostly likely in the form of a survey.
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.
Step 1) Experience Now
We must define what the problem areas are before we can resolve them. Under step 1, organisations identify the experience wants and need of their XLA target population before categorising and prioritising them according their organisation business and experience outcome goals.
Step 2) Experience Ambitions
With the prioritised experience needs, organisation now set about drafting an experience ambition statement - a statement of intent for the overall experience they want to provide to their XLA target population. Whilst one cycle of the XLA design methodology accounts for one XLA, keep in mind your organisation may find the need for multiple XLAs and therefore multiple cycles of the methodology.
Step 3) Sentiment Indicators
Once the experience ambition has been finalised for the XLA, the next step is to design the sentiment questions that will ask the XLA target population about their experience. These questions will be centred around different actionable items in the experience ambition.
Step 4) Other Indicators
After finalising sentiment questions that ask how people feel, the organisation will determine the other indicators that provide context to why people are feeling the way they say they do. Other indicators tend to be split into three categories: operational (SLAs/KPIs), technical (device health) and other (NPS/CSAT).
Step 5) XLA Scoring
With our sentiment and other indicators determined, we now begin the process of scoring them within the XLA. Indicators will be scored based on their impact on experience. When all indicators come together, they create a final score on experience for the XLA, telling experience professionals at a glance what the current state of experience is for the XLA ambition. Scoring enables the tracking of changes and improvements over time to take place.
Step 6) XRM
The experience reference matrix (XRM) is a visual tool that brings together all the data points of an XLA to enable experience professionals to understand experience. An XRM enables a line of sight between sentiment and the other indicators associated with an XLA, meaning experience professionals can see and deduct the reasoning behind the XLA's overall experience score.
Without a solid foundation, we risk the longevity of our XLAs. Using the XLA Design Methodology™, you can build the right experience management metrics for your organizations. How can a business begin it's steps to designing XLAs and managing experience ? You can learn more about the in-depth steps of XLA design in our Experience Practitioner course. If that is too advanced right now, check out how we can manage experience more holistically with our Experience Management Framework and build a more experience-focused organisation with our Experience Optimization Framework.