Experience Management: The New, Modern Service Management?
Looking at services from the user’s perspective can be surprising: Agreements can be fully met and yet dissatisfaction still prevails. On the other hand, an SLA may not have been met in full, but the user experience is still positive. All kinds of combinations are possible.
With a purely technical and agreement-based view of service processes, much remains hidden. While it is true that all formal requirements can be met in this way, this offers limited added value if user experiences are left out of the equation.
Sound experience management (XM for short) is needed to create a holistic view of service processes. It should by no means serve as a competing model to traditional service management; rather, when combined with it, it should reflect reality as accurately and comprehensively as possible.
What Is Experience Management?
Experience management focuses on factors, metrics, and data that, taken together, depict service experiences from the user’s perspective as clearly, precisely, and meaningfully as possible. It is how they’re derived, collected, analyzed, and interpreted with more technical parameters such as SLAs, which are increasingly being enriched and challenged by XLAs (experience level agreements).
Experience metrics and data can be very different in nature: They may be objective and readily quantifiable, such as first contact resolution (FCR) or mean time to respond (MTTR), or consist of entirely subjective, qualitative feedback.
Important: Experience can never be fully modeled and measured; it is always subjective in nature. This explains why, with exactly the same service performance, some customers are completely satisfied while others are bitterly disappointed. It therefore always comes down to individual, subjective perceptions: There is not just one experience, but as many experiences as there are customers.
Experience as a New Key Factor
Terms such as digital employee experience (DEX)—the employee experience in the digital workplace—are becoming increasingly common, while concepts such as the service experience platform (SXP) are also emerging. They all emphasize that experiences are receiving greater attention and becoming an increasingly important factor.
This fundamentally changes the way service delivery is viewed. Agreements remain important but are no longer considered the ultimate benchmark. In addition, new key factors come into play that examine service delivery more from the customer’s perspective. To perform as positively as possible in terms of these experience factors, service providers should focus more on the “how” than the “what” of their services.
Useful Experience Data
The right data is needed to practice experience management effectively. After all, services can only be optimized in terms of experience factors if they are based on a foundation that is as accurate and measurable as possible. This isn’t always easy, unlike many ITSM metrics and service level agreements (SLAs), these values are difficult to capture, interpret, and compare in a standardized manner. It is relatively easy to rely on values such as the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS). However, these do not provide the necessary depth of information to gain valid insights into the customer experience.
Factors That Connect Operations With Experience
First, some metrics bridge the gap between experience and operational performance, which has traditionally been the primary focus. One good indicator, for example, is first contact resolution (FCR), which measures how many requests or problems can be resolved during the first contact. It is important because resolving tickets quickly can significantly increase customer satisfaction, but it does not allow any direct conclusions to be drawn about the experience.
There are also the following important factors:
- Self-service success rate (Can goals be achieved through the self-service portal?)
- Ticket reopen rate
- Abandonment rate (What proportion of users abandon the process?)
- Escalation and complaint rates
- Time to value (How quickly is the desired benefit realized?)
These are external, operational signals rather than direct user impressions; at best, they let us infer them.
Collecting Feedback
To reliably and accurately understand what service experiences are like, we need data and feedback that comes directly from users.
Surveys are the best way to do this, which generate feedback in various ways:
- Transactional feedback: Immediately after an interaction, a brief survey is conducted about that specific interaction.
- Journey-related feedback: This examines the complete path to the desired outcome, such as restoring a service. Were there any problems along the way? How seamless were the transitions?
- Relationship-related feedback: Topics covered by these usually periodic surveys include trust, reliability, and satisfaction. Above all, the question of how likely someone is to recommend the service proves decisive.
- Open-ended qualitative feedback: All types of feedback can be included here, whether free-text responses, targeted interviews, follow-up questions to users, or findings from relevant workshops.
- Unsolicited feedback: Feedback that is not explicitly requested often proves particularly valuable and can come from a wide range of sources, such as email and chat histories, conversation transcripts, comments in tickets, or interactions on social media.
Each type of feedback is valuable in its own way and complements quantitative service management metrics. In this way, impressions and sentiments—which can also be collected separately using AI-powered sentiment analysis—come to light, making the picture of the user experience clearer when supplemented by quantitative and technical data.
Observations of user behavior, which are particularly direct and unfiltered, should not be overlooked in this context either. Important indicators of dissatisfaction may include unsuccessful requests, switching from chatbots to employees, repeated inquiries about processing status, abandoned processes, or repeatedly opening knowledge articles.
Recommendation: How to Put Experience Data Into Context
Even though reliable data, facts, and comparable indicators often matter, companies need to be willing to also draw on qualitative, less structured information. While this information alone cannot be used to compile statistics, it can yield valuable insights that ultimately lead to insights that lead to major improvements.
The crux lies in combining experience data—consisting of user feedback and behavior as well as relevant metrics such as FCR—with traditional service level agreements and technical parameters. This creates a useful picture of the user experience, which proves extremely valuable for maintaining customer relationships, employee satisfaction, and therefore the overall state of the company.
It is advisable to connect three levels that together illuminate service management as comprehensively as possible:
- Operational data: It describes what happened; relevant examples include outages, disruptions, transfers, and resolution times.
- Experience data: It captures how this was experienced, for example in terms of effort, potential inconvenience, or satisfaction.
- Business impact: This is the decisive factor, but it can only be explained by the data mentioned above, meaning that it always emerges afterward. It concerns (negative) consequences such as lost productivity, costs, or even customer churn.
Experience Management: Importance for ITSM
ITSM has always been about setting up and managing IT services in the best possible way. This does not change with experience management. What does change, however, is the perspective: The evaluation of IT services now depends more heavily on how users experience them.
Over time, this leads to a number of changes. For example, companies that focus on experience management are likely to pay greater attention to the customer journey and optimize it to achieve higher customer satisfaction. In this sense, experience management reinforces the very factors that should already be a business priority.
At the same time, the focus shifts somewhat away from the frequently discussed service level agreements; newly defined experience level agreements, by contrast, are gaining importance and acceptance. However, this does not mean that established approaches and best practices become obsolete. Rather, they are supplemented by experience-relevant aspects, resulting in a more complete and modern view of IT service delivery.
Conclusion: Experience Management—A Symbiotic Approach
Experience management clearly emphasizes how users perceive services. Experience has become a key indicator with significant business relevance. It undoubtedly already held an important position in the past; nevertheless, quantifiable ITSM metrics and service level agreements provided the most important guidelines in ITSM and customer service. They offer the advantage of being easier to measure and providing hard criteria that can be clearly defined and enforced in an agreement.
Experiences are harder to capture, translate into concrete metrics, compare, and use as KPIs. This is why they did not serve as important metrics for a long time, even though they are what truly matters—the perception of users, with emotions instead of raw data.
Today, services have evolved rapidly due to new technologies such as generative and agentic artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. At the same time, user expectations are rising: Services should be fast, simple and straightforward, easy to access, and accompanied by sufficient information. Meanwhile, AI-powered evaluations, sentiment analyses, and other applications now provide the basis for analyzing experiences more effectively. All of this explains why experience management is currently gaining so much importance.
However, this does not mean that experience management will now gain sole dominance over ITSM and customer service. Rather, it complements existing factors. In harmony with operational and technical data and traditional metrics, it provides a holistic picture that tells us more about the reality of service delivery and how it is perceived.
OTRS offers a platform that helps optimize experiences in service delivery. With an excellent overview, a high degree of transparency, fast processes, and modern functionality, it enables high-quality service experiences.