A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
Q2ebanking
The Evolution from Service-Level to Experience-Level Agreements
I am part of the team responsible for Q2’s digital banking platform, which serves 23 million end users and 1,400 banks and credit unions. We enable several trillions of dollars in money movement annually, with 75 percent of these transactions conducted on a mobile device.
As Q2’s Chief Availability Officer (CAO), my success is measured by meeting customer service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, responsiveness and quality. Because these originate from hosted environments, the security and compliance of those environments are also implicit. We have constructed our customer contracts to include a typical waterfall of penalty credits measured against a synthetic testing matrix, which validates that the service is up and ready for users. This tried-and-true framework kept pace with us as we moved upmarket, and every new customer set a higher expectation of “what good looks like.”
We had industry-leading SLAs five years ago, and today, customers who signed with us at that time continue to benefit from the demands of each new customer’s SLA, which are market-leading for today’s standards. The tide rises to each new watermark in a SaaS model. Because of that, my commitment extends beyond each contract we negotiate, benefiting all the customers who use that same service. Put more succinctly, if availability increases for one customer, it will increase for all of them.
We see a shift coming in which organizations move away from the classic “uptime” agreement. Instead, success will be measured by the quality of end-user experience. This shift is focused on a critical question, “Are we delivering the end-user experience we intended?” This shift will change what we measure and how we monitor it, showing us where improvements must be made.
Moving away from the classic SLA model to a more complex Experience-Level Agreement (XLA) will undoubtedly be a journey, as it’s not switching from one to the other. Instead, it will take adding and being committed to both SLAs and XLAs.
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.
We see a shift coming in which organizations move away from the classic “uptime” agreement.
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.
