The one with XLAs - Doug Rabold E210

🎤🎞️“The one with XLAs” with Doug Rabold in CX Passport Episode 210🎧 What’s in the episode?...

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction: Welcoming Doug Rabold

2:04 What are XLA’s and why do they matter?

5:43 The difference between SLAs and XLAs

7:32 How XLA’s improve both customer and employee experience

11:32 Treating IT as a business, not just a function

13:52 Real-world XLA success stories

14:17 San Antonio’s hidden gem: The Cove

15:24 First Class Lounge: Travel, food, and guilty pleasures

21:00 Doug’s path from sales to IT leadership

23:32 Why frontline agents must be more tech-savvy

26:08 Where to connect with Doug

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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport

Episode resources:

Doug LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-rabold-itil-hdi/

XLA Institute: https://xla.institute/

Transcript

Doug Rabold: 0:00

If you really stop and think about it, what we've measured in the past is based on the things that help us to be better providers, but they don't really focus on the customer themselves,

Rick Denton: 0:12

customer experience wisdom, a dash of travel talk. We've been cleared for takeoff. The best meals are served outside and require passport. We're staying in my home state today, as today's guest comes from a city that's close to home for me, San Antonio, Texas. If you spent any time there, you know it's got great Tex Mex the treat of a fun River Walk and a special place in history for Texans. Today, though, isn't about enchiladas. Today, we're talking customer experience with Doug labeled, well, maybe a little bit about enchiladas or tacos or queso. Wait, what were we talking about? Oh, right, Doug. Doug is a CX leader, speaker and trainer who has been shaping service management and customer engagement for years. Here's where you already know Doug, or will soon know Doug, X L, A S. He's a huge advocate for shifting the focus from SLAs to X L, A S, because, of course, customers don't care about technical metrics. They care about outcomes. They care about experiences, whether it's IT operations or service excellence, Doug knows how to translate business objectives into meaningful customer impact. Y'all, I don't know how I feel about today's episode. No, no, no, no, not the guest. I'm excited about Doug, but this episode is going to release right around the time I'm either really happy about what's going on in his hometown, or really sad as the final four will be in San Antonio this year, and I have, at the time of recording this, very high hopes that my blue Devils will be there, and hopefully I will be too, while that outcome isn't known. Now, I do know that today's episode is going to be filled with insights higher than a stack of pecan pralines and me teat a Doug, welcome to CX passport.

Doug Rabold: 2:00

Thanks, Rick, appreciate you having me on the show. Hey, let's get

Rick Denton: 2:04

this definition up right up front, because we hear SLAs, we hear X. Las, many have heard it. Some have not. I bet this, however, is a def. Is not a definition that is really well understood. How do you define X? Las, yeah. So,

Doug Rabold: 2:20

so that's, that's a great question, Rick and XLA is, which XLA is short for experience level agreement. And I'm, I'm not even necessarily tied to the a part of that. I'm always concerned, because really what XL A's are is targets, and they're experiential targets. And really what they do is it's, it's a way in which we can identify existing data points or define new data points that help us to index and drive an experience outcome. And so really what we're doing is we're driving toward customer objectives. So instead of measuring outputs, what we're really trying to do is drive better outcomes. And traditional SLAs are metrics that tend to look at productivity measures, and so they're very output driven. XLA s, by contrast, are very outcome driven. So what we're really trying to do is build a better experience and identify the things that are are going to help us achieve that objective. And Doug, that

Rick Denton: 3:28

makes sense. And of thinking of it as a customer, you're right. I don't really care about it's kind of like that same vein of it doesn't really matter what your activity is. It matters what your results are. Even, even with this, the definition is clearer. But why does it matter? Why is this important to overall customer experience? What

Doug Rabold: 3:49

we've measured in the past is based on the things that help us to be better providers, but they don't really focus on the customer themselves, and when you really stop and look at, you know, those organizations, those companies, and, you know, in the background here, you can see, I'm obviously a bit of a Disney fan,

Rick Denton: 4:11

and those that are listening rather than watching, no, I can't even imagine why people would think that when four prints up there are Mickey and Minnie in different cities and all sorts of Disney stuff hanging out on the second shelf. Those companies

Doug Rabold: 4:24

that that really focus in on that experience, they focus on that customer outcome, those customer objectives and what the customer wants out of out of the interaction. Those are the organizations who have lasting power. They're the ones who have legs and tend to be, you know, the the ones that we focus in on, and in this experience driven world, those the companies that that we model after. And so really, what XLA is just a way that we can sort of, in a sense, democratize that approach. And what it does, it helps us identify those things for your. Organization, and that's the key. Unlike SLAs, where they tend to be fairly standard across from from one organization to another, XLS are based on, where are you at today? What's your level of maturity from an experience perspective today? Where do you want to be in the next probably 12 to 15 months, no more than that. And and how do we get there? What are the data points that will allow us to do that? So as an example, this company here has very different objectives from a Cedar Fair slash, you know, Six Flags or or even like a sea world Busch Gardens, very different objectives on what that experience looks like. So the XLA s are not going to be the same for them as it would be for their direct competitors. Okay,

Rick Denton: 5:43

that's something I didn't anticipate. Is because talking about is that idea of how SLAs can be so incredibly well standard, and the idea of an XLA is more about what that brand promises, what that experience is. Help me out and help our listeners out. What's an example of an XLA either for the company behind you, the Disneys or the bush gardens or the sea worlds, or what is an example of an XLA?

Doug Rabold: 6:09

Yeah, and that's a great question, and the reason that it's hard to say that is because everybody has different objectives. So what is my business outcome that I want to achieve, and what do I want to be able to deliver to my customer is going to be very different from one org to another. And I work with global clients, who, in many cases, are direct competitors of one another. And the xlas that I develop for one are very different from those that I develop for another. If there were going to be a universal XLA, the one that I always come back to is employee onboarding experience. That's, that's one of those examples of a universal but what makes it very different in the SLA world, we tend to compartmentalize. So that onboarding experience, there would be an SLA related to the HR process. So the recruiters have their SLAs, and then the and then the trainers have their, you know, their SLAs. And then the, you know, the the deployment team that that does the getting the laptop into somebody's hands, they would have their SLAs, but to the new employee, they could care less about all those different SLAs. What they want to know is, was it smooth, right when I was ready to hit production on day one. Did I have everything I needed in hand? Did I have all the training and all the knowledge at my disposal, at my fingertips, and could I get into the things that I needed to do in order to provide

Rick Denton: 7:33

Yeah, yeah. Can I do my job? Yeah, that's where the XLA comes in.

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Rick Denton: 8:04

I like that you went to the employee side of that because we were talking customers. The reality is these x las refer to any experience Doug when we were talking about XLA s earlier. And I know that you have a kind of an IT focus. Something that resonated in my ears was treat it like a business. What does that mean? And why is that important to

Doug Rabold: 8:29

you? So despite the gray hair, I'm relatively new to the IT world. I've only been involved in information technology for about 15 years now. It was a second career for me. My original career was on the business side and not in the tech industry. I was actually in in sales and sales management, most of that time in financial services, and so I very much came into my new career with a business mindset, and one of the things I kept hearing was treat it like a business, right? And I had to pause and think that through. And at one point I, you know, I was still the new guy, so I was able to just raise my hand and say, Did we really want to treat it like a business, or do we want to treat it as a business? And if you think about what's evolved over the last decade or so, call and contact centers have become more technical, and IT service desks have gotten to be more experiential driven, and so one of the things that's critical is the technologies that we that we use to support the the whoever our customer is, whether it's an internal customer or an external customer, the technologies have to further the business aims. They have to deliver business value. And so to me, if we're treating it like a business, we're really not engaged. We're not involved in the end product, in the end consumer of whatever product or service we're delivering, but when we treat it as a business, suddenly the decisions we make are very different. One organization I worked for, one of the first things that I did as the newly anointed Desktop Manager, which lasted for all of about a week, because I suddenly, I went to my director, and I said, you don't need a Desktop Manager. You need somebody to improve your processes, because they're awful. One of the things that I did first was I went through all the supply closets, and I found boxes and boxes of equipment that had been purchased, like, five years before and never even opened. Wow, but there was a budget for it. And so in order to make sure that the budget doesn't trick the next year, you go and procure and then you just leave it there in case you ever need it, right? And so that's not treating it even like a business, much less as a business. If your end consumer of service saw that, what what are they gonna say? Right? I'm sitting

Rick Denton: 11:02

here as an end consumer. If I saw that, especially if I had a bad service experience, I'd be thinking, hey, look, that equipment could have been used to either improve the knowledge base or hire more agents or improve the actual technology and process behind it. Oh, I'd be livid. Can I circle this back to XLA for a second. How have you seen XLA s help it be treated as a business, as opposed to like a business in

Doug Rabold: 11:32

a sense, one of the frameworks that it is has embraced for decades is the ITIL framework. And ITIL for went part way toward toward what it should have, and that is, it talks about business value. It talks about the co creation of value. Unfortunately, most people that have taken the ITIL for certification have gone in and learned the definition but haven't really applied it. The XLA is that you want to develop are the ones that deliver that business value. So you want to take a look at what's going to make the biggest difference to my customer and and what value can we deliver? And one of the things is, is you want to focus in on those xlas that are going to make the biggest difference the quickest. You don't go in and say, I have all these experience objectives. Here's the 50 XLA s I want to do. You start with three to five, and you focus in on three to five, and that's the way that you really start to layer in treating it as a business is delivering the value that the customer wants. A couple of months back, I was at the Q, A, T, C conference in Nashville. I was asked to do an XLA presentation. Halfway through, a young guy raises his hand, and he says, We're doing XLA s. And I said, What do you mean? You're doing xls? Explain that to me. And he says, Well, I work for a company that distributes pension funds to pensioners. He said, In the past, we would have all these complaints. We'd have bad customer satisfaction scores from from our pensioners because they didn't get their money on time. And he said, so what we did is we all have an ownership stake in them getting their money on time. He says, It doesn't matter if it's the people who do the intake forms. It doesn't matter if it's the people who do the trend, the transit funds to the bank. Doesn't matter if it's the bank who drops the balls, and this is the mind blowing aspect, right? It's not even stuff within our control, but they all own a piece of do the pensioners get their funds on the day that they expect them, or do they not? And he said, we've actually tied it to our compensation structure. Love it. And I'm like, That's XLA, because it's the end to end. It's, what does the outcome look like? The outcome is, did the pensioner get the money on time? This

Rick Denton: 13:53

is it like, that's, that's XLA. Doug, I want to let that sink in a little bit. I want to let us talk about something else. I mentioned San Antonio, it's been a wonderful vacation destination. Most know the river walk, the me, Tierra, other things that are sort of known about San Antonio. What about those other gyms, the gyms that folks may not necessarily know. If you've got a free weekend there, where do you go? Where do you play? Or, perhaps most importantly, where do you eat?

Doug Rabold: 14:18

Yeah, let's talk food a true hidden gem. And it's not hidden nearly as much as it as it used to be. It's it's called the cove, and it's right by San Antonio College. And the way I found it is my wife was actually playing in the senior nationals tennis tournament here in San Antonio several years back. We need to hit every place that's ever been on the Food Network, and one of them was this place called the cove, and it's this, like, funky little Austin vibe. It started off as a car wash, and they still have the car wash there to this day. Okay, at the time, it was a full service car wash, and then they, like, layered in a laundromat, because they had all the. The rags that they needed to wash and all that. And then it became a point up laundromat, and then they started bringing tacos, fish tacos in for their employees. And the employees just ate these things up like loved them. And then the customers would drive through the car wash see these fish tacos, and they'd be like, Hey, I'd like a fish talk. And so the public became aware of this, so they opened a restaurant, and now it's like restaurant, car wash, laundromat. They've got a tap wall with about 40 different beers on it, just a really cool patio with a you know, where the kids can cut loose and the adults can have fun, drink a beer and eat fish tacos. You

Rick Denton: 15:44

Doug. I love the I love that unique thing. And truly, I'm glad that this may come out on or around final four times, if anybody's headed to San Antonio, check out the CO but don't check it out before I get a chance to so that the lines don't get me wrong, one thing that the distance between where I live and where you live, it's only a five hour drive, so first class lounges aren't that big of a deal. Between maybe buckies would be the equivalent of the first class lounge there. And I 35 I still want to invite you to stop down here in the first class lounge of CX passport. We'll move quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past? This past June,

Doug Rabold: 16:24

I actually was a keynote speaker at an event in Helsinki, and I saw that I could take an overnight ferry to Stockholm. Just did it on the spur of a moment, and wound up in Stockholm, coolest city I've been in quite a while. Actually, my first stop was at the Abba Museum. Yes, it's a guilty pleasure. So So I stopped and had a drink at the Abba museum. And then there's a whole museum district right there, and it's called the Your Garden District. And I wound up then at the Viking museum. And in the Viking Museum, they had a Mead tasting room, so I had to go and taste some meads, and then wound up sitting having drinks with some locals. And just a really cool time. I was in Stockholm for like 12 hours, maybe, but just at a phenomenal time.

Rick Denton: 17:15

Oh, I love it. I love those stories. And yes, I'm an Abba lover. My dad played those cassettes in the cars. Doug, what's a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Doug Rabold: 17:25

So my dream travel that I've not been to yet, ironically, as a German American who is a huge Bayern Munich fan and has traced our family lineage back to the 1500s in Bavaria, I have yet to visit Bavaria, so my dream would be to one day tour Bavaria and then wind up the trip with watching a home game at Allianz Arena and see Bayern Munich just trounce that's awesome, Dortmund.

Rick Denton: 17:57

So you already have the specific match in every year you're looking at the schedule and okay, I'm going, then that's awesome. I love that. Doug, you've mentioned some of the delights of travel, and we've talked about food certainly, what is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Doug Rabold: 18:13

I also have a Midwest background. While I was born and raised in Philly, I spent a good part of my youth in the in Illinois, and so Chicago style pizza, phenomenal. Yeah, just give me a deep dish pizza. There's one that I used to order at giordanos in in the Chicago Loop, and it was shrimp and garlic, wonderful. Not

Rick Denton: 18:40

the typical go to but that's, here's another tip, folks, you're in Chicago, get the shrimp and garlic deep dish. Okay, I like that. Doug, the other direction. What's something growing up you were forced to eat, but you hated as a kid. This is

Doug Rabold: 18:54

going to sound awful, but my mom was a terrible cook. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, so pretty much anything my mom made was was not the best. I always loved when my Dad cooked. And I think she did it on purpose. And the one in particular that stands out in my mind was she used to make Swiss steak, and it was just, it was, it got, yeah, not

Rick Denton: 19:19

for you. Well, it is funny how those memories flash back. And I think I could even see it in your face that you're just feeling it at that point. So we will, I will let you leave the first class lounge here. But first, what is one thing in your travel kit, not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without.

Doug Rabold: 19:37

I actually have different bags pre packed that depend on where I'm going. I had my wife is like, you're like a luggage hoarder. In each one I've got specific things, but probably the one thing I would say that I won't leave without is each of them also has a tracker in it. So, yes, so if somebody steals. That piece of luggage I can, I can track down who it was who lifted my bags.

Rick Denton: 20:13

Doug, I think back to when I was doing my backpacking through your post college. It was a 1995 obviously, a different era. Clearly, there were no trackers or anything like that outside of perhaps, you know, spy movies. And I think I would have had a deeper sense of peace having that tracker in some of my my backpack moments there, as opposed to wrapping it around your body while you're trying to sleep in a train station or inside some sort of hostel or something like that. So I can see why that would be your one travel item. We were earlier talking about it, Doug, but that's not where you started. You even told me it's sort of a second career of sorts to you. What actually brought you to it, service desk work. Are there lessons from the prior world that you take into that it? Service desk work? Today,

Doug Rabold: 21:00

I had a long and lucrative career in sales and sales management here in San Antonio. The problem that I encountered was, each time you met a sales objective, they made the goal that much harder to meet the next time, right? And I finally got to that point that, you know, I was working 70 hours a week and just wasn't it wasn't fulfilling. I just told my wife. I was like, I can't do it anymore. And God bless her for actually saying, Well, what do you want to do? I was like, you know, I've been around technology my whole life. I have no formal training, but I'm good at it. I'm self taught, and so, you know, maybe I'd like to do that. It just so happened that I knew some folks that were moving the Whataburger headquarters from Corpus Christi up to San Antonio, okay, and and I was a co worker of mine. His wife was actually running the IT service desk for them, and basically had to rebuild it because most of the people from the service desk in Corpus, didn't want to relocate. She gave me a shot to start off at the bottom as a level one service desk analyst, okay? And the reason I was willing to do it that way, or actually embrace doing it that way, is service desk is sort of the pulse of it. And if you think about it, when people call for for help, they call the help desk. That's it to them. It's not the the people running the servers or right or, you know, managing the cloud services to them. It's who they're talking to, and that's the service desk. And so I learned it inside out. It was five years or less that I was, I was a director in it. So it's because I learned the business from the inside, and also had that business mentality that I brought with me. You know,

Rick Denton: 22:47

Doug, as I hear you tell that story how you got there. It explains a lot of what you and I were talking about earlier, and some of your interests in that area. XLA is alone, right? Be you. You came out of that sales world, so that you knew customers, you knew what their expectations were around experiences. You then entered into a tech world, and you got to see how that could be dominated by this SLA mentality. But how does that actually do better with XLA? I want to close with some of the kind of links those two worlds together. You have said that the frontline Customer Contact Center, so the people right there engaging with the customer straight up, need to be more tech savvy. Why do you say that

Doug Rabold: 23:32

15 years ago, when I first started off in it, not everybody carried around a powerful computer in their hand or in their pocket. 24 Right, right? You know, it was probably only about 15 to 20% of the of the the US population actually carried phones. And so end users in the IT space, customers in the public space, are all much more tech savvy themselves. People try self service first. Now they try the easy fix. They'll go to YouTube, or they'll go to Tiktok, they'll they'll search and they'll try the solution themselves. So when they call for support, whether it's in the call and contact center space or in the IT service desk space, it's probably a more complex issue than it was 10 to 15 years ago. That's why in the call and contact center space, they need to be more technically inclined, and why? In the service desk space, they need to be more customer focused, more experience driven, because now you've got somebody who's tried everything, they're exasperated and they don't want to hear your snarky ID 10 t you know, or picnic, if you're familiar with those ID 10 t is, is, if you look at it, it spells idiot. Picnic is problem in share, not in computer, and those are things that it serviced, as people used to talk about their customers, right, right? And so now they've gotten away. Them that because of the fact that they understand that they're no longer ID 10 teas, they're now actually who are educated, they're technically savvy, and they have to they've already tried everything. Now you need to get more technical, but you also need to be able to soothe the raw nerve.

Rick Denton: 25:18

That really hits me is that the assumption is they've already made the attempt to self serve. So yeah, I've already turned it off and turned it on. As you're saying that I feel that internal rage of, yeah, I already did that. Thanks a lot. I'm I got that one. And so assuming that they already know that requires that I'm going to have to offer a higher level technology solution as that frontline agent that frontline agent that makes a lot of sense to me, Doug, I've enjoyed kind of the range here, the XLA, the it the understanding of why frontline needs to be more focused on technology. And yeah, I'm also glad that I've now have a couple of new places to go to in San Antonio, if folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, your focus around XLA is or just, hey, what's the place you didn't tell Rick on the show? What's the best way for them to get in touch? My

Doug Rabold: 26:08

second life, if you will, is on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me there. Also, I'm the evangelist for XLA Institute. It's a relatively new organization. We just launched in the US in January of this year, so you can reach me through the XLA Institute website.

Rick Denton: 26:26

I will get the XLA Institute there in the show notes, scroll down, and you'll be able to just click right to Doug's LinkedIn profile or get access right there to the XLA Institute. Doug, it has been a wide ranging and a widely delightful conversation with you today. Doug, thank you for being on CX passport. Appreciate it. Rick, Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.