By Hank Marquis

Quality of Service ≠ Quality of Experience

Photo Credit: pexels.com/@kseniachernaya

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

QoS is the tech that helps this young woman see, and QoE is how well she thinks she sees. It’s the same in the digital workplace — IT can declare success, but only employees decide whether the experience actually works for them.

Many IT organizations proudly point to strong Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance — uptime, latency, capacity, throughput. Yet users still report frustration, slowdowns, and dissatisfaction. Technical success and human experience often diverge, and that gap is where most misunderstandings between business and IT begin.

SLAs traditionally focus on Quality of Service (QoS): the mechanical, operational characteristics required for technology to function. These are necessary measures, but they do not describe the Quality of Experience (QoE), which is how employees feel about the service they receive.

That is why many organizations now introduce Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) alongside — and often above — SLAs. SLAs describe technical performance. XLAs describe human experience. An XLA ties success to perceptions, expectations, and outcomes for real work rather than to raw uptime alone. In other words, XLAs operationalize QoE.

People don’t think in terms of latency budgets and packet loss. They think in terms of getting work done — or struggling to do so. QoE is simply the emotional and cognitive perception that forms when experience does not match expectation. When expectations are unmet, dissatisfaction rises regardless of perfect technical performance.

Consider QoS as “inside IT” and QoE as “outside IT.” QoS tells you that the systems are healthy. QoE tells you whether employees believe they can accomplish what matters. The two views often disagree, and without QoE and XLAs, IT teams can easily believe everything is fine while the business feels the opposite.

That disconnect is not new. But the consequences are getting more serious as digital work becomes central to every role. Measuring QoS alone leaves you blind to the experience employees are actually having.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Analyze your current metrics and reporting — starting with your SLAs (and wherever possible, XLAs).

Look closely at what your existing metrics truly tell you about the business. Every QoS measure should help you understand something about QoE. If it doesn’t, you may be measuring technical performance in a way that doesn’t reflect employee experience or business outcomes.

Most organizations discover that their metrics are overwhelmingly QoS-centric and SLA-driven. That isn’t a failure — but it does mean your reporting will miss the human experience, which is where dissatisfaction actually forms. XLAs give you a place to define and protect that experience explicitly.

To capture QoE, you must determine which QoS metrics can be meaningfully mapped to workgroups, user communities, and business transactions. Do your current measures tell you anything about how work is actually accomplished?

Investigate how to create QoE metrics tied to business impact.

Your goal should be a reporting structure that combines QoS and QoE. The simple “up / down / degraded” concept works only if it is defined from the business perspective. A service is “up” when the employee can complete enough transactions to meet their objectives. It is “down” when productivity drops below an agreed threshold. Everything in between is “degraded.”

XLAs are where these definitions live. They describe what “good” experience looks like for each workgroup, not just what “healthy” infrastructure looks like to IT.

Assess whether your systems can generate the necessary QoS data.

Do your systems produce QoS measures detailed enough to map to business impact? Are services defined clearly enough to create a meaningful matrix between QoS performance and user outcomes? Are customer relationships mature enough to collaborate on QoE and XLA definitions?

Develop QoE metrics for critical applications.

QoE is the difference between what employees expect and what they perceive over time. It combines transactional satisfaction with cumulative experience. Traditional satisfaction tools — NPS, CES, CSAT, engagement surveys — are snapshots, not diagnostics. QoE reveals why the experience feels the way it does, not just whether someone is momentarily pleased or annoyed.

Start with your SLAs, then shape XLAs that map QoS to QoE.

Form a team that includes IT, business representatives, and people who understand the workflow. Choose one critical service. Agree on definitions for “up,” “degraded,” and “down.” Map QoS metrics to business transactions — customer orders, claims processed, shipments completed, whatever the business cares about. Capture those agreements in an XLA and refine the results until both sides feel the model reflects reality.

This is the foundation of understanding the expectation–perception gap, which is central to Completely Satisfied. When you measure that gap correctly, you can see why people feel the way they do — and how those feelings affect productivity, retention, and success in the digital workplace.

This same model is embedded in Hailee’s workgroup digital twin. Hailee connects QoS, perception, expectation, tolerance, and business impact automatically, showing where the service works mechanically but fails experientially. Doing this manually takes interviews, mapping, modeling, and weeks of interpretation. Hailee applies the same method instantly, making the real story behind employee experience visible for the first time, in a way that directly supports modern XLA thinking.

When you measure both QoS and QoE — and express them through XLAs that reflect real work — you get closer to your customers, clearer about what matters, and more confident about where to focus your improvements. That is where digital employee experience begins.

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

Best,
Hank

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