Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) are a new measurement framework in Freshservice that helps IT teams understand how employees actually experience IT service and not just whether tickets were closed on time.

Overview

Traditionally IT helpdesks have used service level agreement (SLA) adherence as the primary metric to measure the efficacy. SLA tells you whether work was completed on time, however it does not tell you whether employees felt supported, whether the interaction was smooth, or whether the service experience was positive.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) helps capture this, which is retrospective. By the time CSAT drops, the experience has already been impacted.

XLAs address this gap by introducing a live, proactive measure of service delivery efficacy. Each ticket in Freshservice receives a Unified Experience Score based on the service offered by the agent to the requester

Unlike SLAs, which often push agents to focus primarily on speed of delivery, XLAs help agents balance speed with the quality of experience delivered to the requester. Because the score is visible while the ticket is still open, agents get a real-time signal to improve the experience before it turns into negative feedback.

In this way, XLA becomes the new-age benchmark for IT service performance, moving teams from retrospective measurement to proactive experience management.

The Unified Experience Score

Every ticket receives a Unified Experience Score composed of three components. Teams can configure each component and adjust its relative weight to reflect what great service looks like in their organization.

Service Reliability

Measures whether the ticket was resolved within the agreed timeframe. 

Service Quality

Measures the standard of the interaction and the resolution itself.

Requester Effort

Measures how much effort the employee had to put in to get their issue resolved. A ticket that was technically resolved but required multiple follow-ups and back-and-forth will score lower on this dimension.

How it works

XLAs combine operational data, experience signals, and user context to generate a score that is surfaced directly within the ticket view. Agents can see the score while work is still in progress, allowing them to adjust their approach before the experience deteriorates.

This is a shift from reactive to proactive workflow. With traditional CSAT, IT teams learn about a poor experience after the ticket is already closed. With XLAs, agents have the signal they need to intervene earlier, communicate better, go deeper on a resolution, or reprioritize when the experience score indicates it is needed.

XLAs do not replace CSAT. They work alongside it by protecting the experience before it breaks down, which in turn keeps CSAT healthy.