Connect device, sentiment, and workplace data to move beyond SLAs

What makes a workday go well? Ask around your office, and the answers rarely stop at technology.

A laptop that keeps up with you matters. So does a meeting room that's ready at your reserved time, an office at the right temperature so you can concentrate, and a service desk that anticipates requests before you have to submit them. Digital experience management tools have gotten very good at measuring things like device health and performance. But they capture far less of the rest, even though all of it shapes the day just as much.

Much of this comes from a service-level agreement (SLA) mindset: a ticket closed on time, a device back online, a target met. Useful signals, but they say nothing about how the day actually felt. IT leaders running experience programs are increasingly closing that gap with a wider approach called total experience.

What is total experience?

Total experience is a strategy that measures and improves the whole workday. It draws on device and application data, how people say the day went, and the conditions of the space they worked in. These questions guide it:

• Were employees more productive?
• Did they feel supported?
• Did employees and customers have frictionless experiences?
• Did the organization meet its objectives?

Three signals answer them when read together: device and application data, sentiment, and workplace conditions.

Device and application data come from digital employee experience (DEX) platforms, such as Unisys' partnership with Nexthink. Installed across an organization's devices, they report health and uptime, memory and storage, patch status, crash frequency and login duration, then aggregate those readings into patterns across thousands of endpoints.

Sentiment comes from the workforce. How did onboarding feel? Was the new application worth learning? Did a support interaction leave someone confident or frustrated? Experience-level agreements (XLAs) put those questions into measurable form. An SLA commits to closing a ticket within four hours. An XLA commits to a defined experience and then asks people how it went.

Workplace conditions shape the hours in between. Temperature, airflow, humidity, and air quality affect concentration. Booking systems for desks and parking determine how someone's morning starts, and collaboration spaces vary in how well they support a meeting.

Read separately, each signal describes one aspect of the day. Read together, they show the combined effect.

What happens when experience data is connected?

One data point can answer more than one question. A device flagged for replacement is also a cost, carbon, and productivity signal. An environmental reading that explains a dip in an experience score is also a facilities-planning signal. The information is already in the data you collect; the value comes from reading it together. With the help of AI, you can do this continuously and at scale.

Persona-based XLAs sharpen that view, measuring how delivery felt versus whether it arrived on time. Measure the experience of workers who directly affect business outcomes, and you can see where friction can be removed and where systems are working well. Business-specific XLAs do the same for initiatives leaders track: onboarding, experience parity between office and home, or adoption of a new tool. With this layer of data, leaders can see whether an initiative is landing with teams.

Why does experience management require organizational change?

Four areas of delivery put these signals to work: proactive fixes, security, asset management, and sustainability. In many organizations, each belongs to a different team, with its own owner, toolset, and reporting line, and its own definition of a good outcome. That's the challenge: comparing a security improvement with a sustainability gain needs a common unit of value, so prioritizing across them stalls.

The fix is structural. Tag every initiative with the value it delivers, then bring the whole portfolio into a single view. Now each initiative carries its value on the surface, so the four teams work from one definition of success. Comparison becomes possible, sequencing gets easier, and an experience management office turns the shared view into action, deciding what to pursue and reporting results in terms that leaders recognize.

Coordinated this way, the four areas inform each other, and you can prioritize across all of them on the same terms. Structure comes first. Once it holds, experience management can extend into the parts of the workday that shape how the day goes.

How do you put total experience into practice?

Three actions make the shift practical. Start by tagging every initiative with the value it delivers, so security, sustainability, and support work can be weighed on the same terms. Then bring those initiatives into one view and give a single team, an experience-management office, the mandate to act on it. Finally, choose the personas whose experience most affects business outcomes and measure those first, rather than trying to cover everyone at once.

Unisys made this shift internally before bringing it to clients. We built one structured view of our own AI initiatives, each tagged by the value it delivers, with digital experience tooling embedded across the service desk, field services, and endpoint management. That work, along with our role as a founding member of the XLA Institute, shapes how we help clients connect device, sentiment, and workplace signals into a single view they can act on.

Total experience is where digital workplace delivery is heading next. The organizations moving first are restructuring around a shared view of value, and it is already changing how their teams set priorities. Connect with one of our experts to explore what total experience could mean for your organization.