By Hank Marquis

Quality of Service ≠ Quality of Experience

Get Closer to Your Customers with Improved IT Service and Digital Workplace Solution Metrics

QoS is the tech that helps this young woman see, and QoE is how well she thinks she sees. It's the same for digital IT workplaces and employees — it doesn't matter what the optometrist or IT says. It's up to the customers to decide.

Many traditional IT metrics purport to "prove" that IT meets Service Level Agreements (SLAs), yet Customers and Users still feel dissatisfaction with IT performance.

Most SLAs contain technical Quality of Service (QoS) metrics like capacity, "uptime," etc. These are necessary for IT, but they do not measure Quality of Experience (QoE) or express IT performance in a way that employees and customers feel, or businesses can understand.

Sadly, reporting technical QoS metrics often forms the basis of dissatisfaction and misunderstandings between business and IT dealings!

It's because most people need help understanding the term QoE. But all of us know how it feels when it is missing! Simply, it means the emotional perception we develop when using a service doesn't match our expectations or needs. These personal hopes and opinions affect loyalty, retention, purchase decisions, and your company's financial performance.

Consider QoS as measuring service "from inside IT" and QoE as measuring service "from outside IT." QoS is operational and mechanical. QoE is emotional feelings.

QoS refers to the mechanical aspects of a digital workplace solution or service. Rather dull (but essential) things like time to answer support calls, capacity, transport latency, etc. But QoE is how the digital employee feels after using the service.

The problem is that QoS and QoE are different concepts.

Without QoE metrics, you may think you are meeting requirements and doing well, but your business customers and digital employees disagree.

What makes IT service metrics fail is reporting QoS (technical operational) terms instead of QoE (employee success.)

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Analyze your current metrics and reporting, starting with your existing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or other promissory documents.

Try to understand what your existing metrics tell you about business impact. Every QoS metric should contribute to an understanding of QoE. Be careful of QoS metrics without connection to QoE and business transactions. Also, note that some IT services support multiple Customer Facing Services (CFS) — you may need more than one mapping of QoS to QoE to capture customer and business impact.

Assume that you will find that most of your ITπ metrics are for QoS and not QoE and that you may need to change your collection and reporting systems significantly.

You may need to change the source and type of QoS metrics you measure to capture QoE adequately. It would be best if you determined, at a minimum, which current QoS metrics you can map to user communities and business transactions. Do your current metrics tell you anything about business transactions?

Investigate your options for creating QoE business impact metrics based on user minutes and business transactions lost.

Your goal should be a report with metrics that combine QoS and QoE. Your new reports should distinguish between "up," "down," and "degraded" states. When a user can accomplish an agreed volume of IT service-dependent transactions, it is "up." When user production falls below a set level, the service is "down." In between, it is "degraded." This requires the involvement of business units or line managers, which can present challenges and constraints to your service measurement initiative. Note that digital employees may still be unhappy, so your measurements and levels are still off.

Assess the ability of your IT systems to produce QoS metrics.

Do systems make the QoS measures required? Have you defined IT services with enough detail to create business impact matrices? Are customer relationships mature enough to engage one or more customers to establish QoE business impact metrics? What do "up," "down," and "degraded" mean to your business, IT, and service?

Develop QoE metrics for critical applications.

QoE is essential for providing all employees with a positive digital workplace experience. QoE offers a comprehensive approach to assessing IT experience and diagnosing the causes of poor experiences. QoE is the difference between what we expect from an IT digital workplace solution or service and what we experience. It can be positive or negative. There are two core satisfaction constructs: transactional and cumulative. Satisfaction is a pulse in time—it's transactional. Multiple feelings of (dis)satisfaction decrease or increase perceived experience over time, and QoE measures this perception. It gets confusing because there are many non-diagnostic transactional approaches: NPS, CES, IT-CSAT, HR engagement surveys, and innumerable "home-grown approaches."

Start by examining existing SLAs and the QoS and QoE metrics and promises they contain.

Establish a team that includes customers or business analysts that genuinely understand and can represent "what happens when service XYZ goes away" in business transaction terms such as "motorcycles manufactured," "cases of beer shipped," "customer orders processed," and so on, as appropriate for your business. Choose one critical IT service, engage its business sponsor or business process owner, and then agree on definitions for "up," "degraded," and "down." Use a simple matrix to map QoS metrics and systems performance onto QoE business transactions. Improve your initial QoE report over time. When you and your customer are satisfied, roll out the new reporting structure to other services, business units, and SLAs.

By measuring the expectation-perception gap, you can improve satisfaction, productivity, and retention in the digital workplace. Unlocking the success of the digital workplace begins with learning the core of the digital employee experience using QoE.

Businesses should focus on understanding how IT service performance affects the success of business transactions and how reporting IT service performance from a business perspective is essential.

To bridge the gap between IT and business, creating metrics that show the impact of IT performance on digital employees and their transactions is vital. This will help ensure that your IT metrics accurately reflect the business performance.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

— END —