The Evolution from Service-Level to Experience-Level Agreements

Beyond the current practice of synthetically logging into the platform every minute to ensure it’s up and available to users, it will take many more considerations into account, like ensuring that the 1,500 wire transfers that users attempted today are successful as well as ensuring thousands of carefully crafted targeted ads are live in the digital banking environments. These are just a couple of examples.

For customers, uptime and responsiveness are assumed. If they click a button to complete a transaction, they expect money to move without fail. However, the tolerance for failure has evolved past measuring a site outage to determining if a single transaction was successfully processed. Our expectations are high, and the math is sometimes daunting. Imagine a 99.99 percent site uptime, this only allows for 4.3 minutes of monthly downtime (pretty good), however, it is an error rate of 100million transactions in a trillion— not good enough. It’s also important to note that during the past five years, money movement has increased over 630% in dollar amounts and over 550 percent in raw transaction volume, all while we saw twice the number of end users and a 650 percent increase in login rates. These dramatic increases in transaction volume require rapid scalability while, at the same time, refining and improving the quality of our execution.

Our customers’ high expectations have driven us to rethink what is possible. The effort we underwent to support the growth of 50% more end users seemed impossible at the time. To grow by ten times while improving the quality of the experience might have seemed unfair and, frankly, a goal that would be very challenging to achieve. However, customers aren’t concerned by our expectations. What they care about is meeting their account holders’ evolving expectations. Our choice is clear. Delivering on their expectations was paramount.

Because of this commitment, we are forging a path to XLAs by focusing on the following actions:

• Define The End User Interactions – It is imperative to define each lane where there is a completed transaction. This list includes logins, checked balances, real-time funds transfers, real-time wires and more.

• Find An Industry Benchmark – It’s also critical to compare each of these lanes to “what good looks like.” We do not have many comparisons within our direct market, so we must look outside to companies that are experts in money transactions, such as Visa, whose revenue is directly affected by each transaction’s success.

• Ensure You Have Visibility – Measuring XLAs may require re-tooling and collaboration with key stakeholders. You need the visibility of what you are delivering today to start crafting your journey to what is possible in the future while measuring improvements along the way.

• Develop A Cross-Functional Team – You likely can’t do this alone. Ensure strong alignment across the organization with this transition to XLAs. You may need the assistance of your Support or Development partners to make the necessary improvements.

• Create Tight Feedback Loops – Determine the areas where issues are surfacing, then prioritize and share data points with the teams that can execute the improvements. Then, redeploy and repeat.

There isn’t a single switch to flip that will address all the issues quickly, so expect the work to take on an iterative, continuous-improvement style of progress, allowing you to celebrate the wins as you increase your velocity to “what great looks like.” And most importantly, be thankful for customers with elevated expectations— they will empower you to evolve from good to great.