- Greg Hall
- Reading Time: 5 minutes
Adding experience level agreements to an outsourcing contract isn’t as simple as it sounds, but successful programs start small, establish a baseline, and mature over time.
Organizations usually face the same questions concerning XLAs: What should we measure, who owns the data, how should incentives work, and how will this change provider behavior after signature.
There are no easy answers either, but after advising clients in MSP relationships with major providers, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Successful XLA programs rarely start with massive transformation, nor rely on perfection before adding experience accountability to the contract.
Start with the right metrics
The first concern I hear is what to measure. MSPs often steer that discussion toward metrics already in their reporting stack. That’s a trap.
Unlike SLAs, which measure operational outputs, XLAs should focus on employee experience and business outcomes. The strongest programs start with three to five high-signal metrics tied to the employee journeys creating the most friction. More than that and the program loses focus before it gains traction.
I typically recommend starting with employee satisfaction scores, perceived lost productivity time, repeat incident rates, task completion success, and ease of getting support. Then focus early measurement on common employee experiences like service desk interactions, employee onboarding, application reliability, and device performance.
Trying to measure everything is understandable, but it’s also one of the fastest ways to stall an XLA program.
Precisely define roles and responsibilities
This is the part of XLA contract design where I spend the most time with clients, and it’s the part that major MSPs are most likely to leave vague if you let them. Accenture and TCS both have mature commercial teams skilled at agreeing to things in principle while avoiding specific accountability in writing. Don’t let that happen here.
Employee experience isn’t solely the vendor’s responsibility. It’s genuinely shared, which is a more productive framing than pure vendor accountability, but only if the split is clearly spelled out. This is what I’ve found works in practice.
Customer responsibilities
- Selecting tools and platforms
- Managing data infrastructure
- Sharing experience data openly with the provider
- Supporting internal improvement initiatives that the provider flags
Vendor responsibilities
- Running the measurement cadence
- Delivering monthly experience reporting
- Identifying and surfacing improvement opportunities from the data
- Executing operational improvements within agreed timelines
Without this level of specificity, XLA programs almost always become reporting exercises. The data gets collected, the scorecard gets presented, and nothing actually changes.
Build flexible targets
One of the biggest mistakes in XLA design is treating experience targets like traditional SLAs, setting once at contract signing and left unchanged for years. Employee expectations, workforce patterns, and technology environments, after all, evolve constantly. A target that feels ambitious in year one may become meaningless by year three.
The strongest XLA contracts include formal reviews every three to six months to recalibrate targets, align with business priorities, and raise expectations as experience improves. This prevents providers from locking in easy wins and coasting. When providers resist review cycles, it’s often a sign they believe the targets can be met on autopilot, a red flag in any XLA program.
Use the right scoring method
One overlooked XLA best practice is how experience scores are calculated. Point-in-time scores can be distorted by outages, isolated incidents, or low survey participation, and providers sometimes exploit that volatility.
I advise clients to calculate official XLA scores using rolling two-month averages instead of snapshots. It creates a more stable and accurate view of experience trends, and makes operational timing games much harder. Most importantly, define the scoring methodology explicitly in the contract. Don’t leave it to be worked out operationally after signing.
