XLA and proactive IT support finally in reach with Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Research conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Nexthink (“State of the DEX Industry Work Sector Report”) shows that Digital frustrations remain largely invisible, with 56% going unreported according to Vanson Bourne. Yet they have a significant impact on how employees perceive IT. According to Gartner, through 2027, 75% of organizations without a DEX strategy and tool will fail to successfully reduce digital friction. 

This has driven a global focus on improving the Digital Employee eXperience (DEX), also known as End-User Experience Management (EUEM). Organizations are increasingly realizing that a great digital experience is essential not only for productivity, but also for employee satisfaction, talent retention, and the strategic value of IT. 

What is DEX? 

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) combines technical performance data from your IT landscape with real-time employee sentiment to deliver a complete, end-to-end view of the digital workplace. This holistic perspective helps organizations identify, prioritize, and address the issues that truly impact employees. By adopting DEX, you move beyond traditional service level agreements (SLAs) and start managing based on experience level agreements (XLAs), breaking down siloed approaches and focusing on what really matters: the employee experience. 

The outcome? A more satisfied and productive workforce, fewer escalations, and lower IT costs. DEX platforms give you the continuous visibility and automation you need to scale and refine your employee experience. 

Figure 1: Example of a DEX dashboard 

Finally achievable 

In the IT market, we've been talking for years about Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) and proactive support, but very few organizations have truly reached this phase. Until now.

By implementing a DEX platform properly, organizations can gain deep, real-time insights into what employees are actually experiencing. This enables IT to move beyond reactive incident handling toward proactive support, or even preventing issues before employees notice them. Instead of relying solely on SLAs that measure technical uptime, IT can now deliver on XLAs, experience-based metrics that reflect the quality of the digital workplace from the employee's point of view. 

DEX makes the shift from SLAs to XLAs, and from reactive to proactive IT support, and even preventive, finally achievable.

The shift from SLA to XLA

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) encompasses everything an employee encounters in their digital work environment. This experience is shaped by dozens of factors, including technical factors like network quality, device performance, application performance, and the way incidents are resolved.

Traditionally, IT has been managed on these technical factors through Service Level Agreements (SLAs). While SLAs are valuable KPIs, employees depend on an entire chain of services that must work seamlessly together. A metric like “98.2% uptime” may reflect an application's availability, but tells us little about how the employee experiences that application.  

A key enabler of this shift is the DEX score, a measurable indicator that combines two key dimensions: 

• Sentiment score, based on employee feedback gathered through targeted questions like: 
  “How would you rate the speed of your laptop?”, 
  “How stressful is your digital workday?”, or 
  “How well does your digital workplace support your work-life balance?” 

• Technology score, based on objective data such as device health, application responsiveness, and network performance. 

Figure 2: The Digital Experience Score 

By combining these insights, organizations get a holistic view of the digital employee experience. The DEX score can be translated into steerable KPIs and dashboards that reflect IT performance from the user's perspective, helping prioritize improvements that boost productivity, satisfaction, and employee retention. 

DEX as a new KPI enabling proactive support

In organizations that take Digital Employee Experience (DEX) seriously, the XLA (derived from the DEX score), alongside traditional SLAs, is elevated to a full-fledged KPI. When you act on insights from DEX, you are able to shift from reactive support to proactive, and even preventive, support. Employees no longer have to chase solutions themselves; instead, you anticipate their needs and respond before issues escalate, in some cases even preventing problems before they occur. This transforms IT’s image from “IT is only there to fix problems” to “IT improves my digital experience.”

In other words: you evolve from putting on band aids, to addressing root causes early, and eventually preventing incidents entirely. The result? Less time wasted on avoidable problems for both employees and the service desk, and a measurable boost in the DEX score, along with greater job satisfaction for employees & IT teams, resulting in lower attrition. 

Technical uptime isn’t the whole story 

Traditionally, IT performance was measured through SLAs. For example, an IT manager with a minimum SLA target of 97% would consider the month a success if application availability was 98.2%, network performance was 99.2%, server uptime was 97.4%, and back-end services were running at 99.2%. From a technical standpoint, all targets were met. 

However, with the introduction of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platforms, we can now measure the actual experience of employees through XLA metrics. In this case (see figure 2), the employee XLA is 96.5%, below the 97% target. 

This discrepancy shows that while the individual systems may be functioning within agreed thresholds, the combined impact of small technical issues across the stack still leads to a degraded experience for employees. 

Figure 3 – SLA vs XLA explained 

The DEX-roadmap 

A DEX platform’s data-driven insights, combining both quantitative and qualitative metrics, provide more than just a DEX score. They also enable you to accurately identify key issues and measure their real impact. This insight forms the foundation of a targeted DEX roadmap, guiding the planning and implementation of meaningful improvements - whether technical, such as optimizing network performance, or functional, like driving user adoption and training initiatives. 

Moreover, a DEX platform facilitates easy collection of user feedback to evaluate solutions, creating a continuous improvement cycle that keeps the digital experience evolving. 

Driving ROI through the snowball effect

Managing Digital Employee eXperience (DEX) with a DEX-platform requires an initial investment of time, budget, and expertise. But the return on investment (ROI) quickly becomes evident. By making data-driven decisions and focusing on the value each initiative brings, you can prioritize the low hanging fruit, the most impactful use cases, and realize tangible results faster. Example of this low hanging fruit are failing batteries, full harddisks, often crashing applications, etc.

As the momentum builds, the DEX score steadily improves. Through continuous analysis, regular employee feedback, and targeted optimizations, organizations can also tackle more complex challenges, the higher-hanging fruit, such as proactive lifecycle management, self-service portal improvements, and persona-based experiences. Over time, IT transforms from a break-fix helpdesk into a strategic enabler of productivity and digital well-being. 

While the need for a DEX platform depends on factors like company type, digital maturity, and business goals, we typically recommend it for organizations with over 500 workstations. 

If you’d like to explore with us how managing your organization through the DEX score can add value, or even be essential, don’t hesitate to contact us today.