Wednesday, September 1, 2021

customer delight level objectives (DLO's)


Most technology organizations have embraced the shift away from 20th century service level agreements (SLAs) and 19th century availability measures of "mean time between failures" (MTBF)  mean time to repair (MTTR).  Everyone is looking at service level objectives (SLO's) which are customer-perspective measures of your service, outage budgets, and service level indicators (SLI's).  SLI's are numerical observations and, one hopes near-isomorphic mappings to SLOs.

I perceive that direct customer feedback, engagement, & emotion are missing from our measurements.  When we formulate our objectives, measurements, and actions, we make terrible assumptions about what our customers want, how they feel, and if they like what we have delivered.

I am therefore proposing that instead of Service Level Objectives and outage budgets we should start with Customer Delight Objectives (DLOs).  Delighting customers is all that matters.  We ignore direct customer feedback, customer sentiment, and customer promotion of our service at our peril.

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