Even today, most IT teams become aware of issues through the very same means as they did fifteen years ago through a support ticket. The office laptop is running slow, the important application keeps crashing, and the company’s VPN connection fails midway through an important call, and all of this is only reported once the frustration has boiled over. Multiply this situation many times over, and this becomes not just an IT issue but a business issue.
It was precisely to bridge this gap that Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platforms were created. Instead of relying upon people reporting their pain points, DEX platforms detect them before this happens and resolve them even before users report them. For enterprises that want to increase digital workplace productivity without increasing headcount, this shift to being proactive rather than reactive can be the difference on the bottom line.
What is a Digital Employee Experience Platform?
Digital Employee Experience platforms are software that monitors, analyzes, and continuously works on improving every experience that the employees have while using their technology, devices, applications, networks, and collaboration tools. Instead of asking questions like “Is the server running?”, the DEX platform poses the right question, which is “Is the person trying to use technology to complete his/her job actually able to?” It integrates endpoint experience monitoring, digital experience monitoring (DEM) and sentiment information into one single window of how employees feel while completing their tasks. This software runs silently in the endpoints and gathers information regarding the number of data points per device, boot times, crashes, resource pressure, Wi-Fi availability, SaaS response time and converts it into experience scores that the leaders can act on.
DEX Platform vs Traditional IT Monitoring
In case you have an existing infrastructure monitoring or ITSM tool, the obvious question to raise is that if DEX is just another name for the same thing. Not really, because traditional IT monitoring is infrastructure-focused, informing whether the hardware and the network are up and running. On the other hand, DEX platform is experience-focused, measuring the results of this process. While the server is working at 99.9% uptime, the device can still take four minutes to boot and login to fail from time to time.
Dimension Traditional IT Monitoring DEX Platform
Primary question Is the system available? Can the employee work effectively?
Vantage point Data center / network core Endpoint and end user
Signal Uptime, latency, capacity Experience score, device health, and sentiment
Posture Reactive (alert after failure) Proactive (fix before impact)
Measures System health Digital workplace productivity
Don’t let that confuse you. DEX does not replace your monitoring stack, it just adds another layer to it. With a DEX platform, while your current tools make sure things are kept running (the lights are turned on), we take care of making sure those who use these systems can actually do their jobs (the lights are turned off).
But how exactly do they improve productivity? Let’s look at some examples below!
Productivity gains come from four concrete mechanisms:
Early elimination of friction – continuous scoring identifies degradation at an early stage (e.g., your laptop identifying it has an early disk failure) and allows for timely remediation before it’s too late, eliminating the need to scramble during quarter close to prevent business disruption;
Automated, self-healing remediation – modern platforms eliminate the vast majority of simple issues automatically (i.e. without requiring user interaction). For every issue that resolves itself quietly, you’ve avoided one potential point of interruption;
Faster resolution for escalated problems – by providing context from historical experiences as well as current events, service desks are able to rapidly identify and isolate issues, greatly reducing call frequency;
And lastly, Targeted problem solving – using aggregated experience data, you can quickly determine which application, device or location is dragging productivity down the most and systematically address those areas first.
All of these factors contribute to the power of workplace analytics software.
The Benefits of DEX in the Modern Digital Workplace
This is true for more than just pure productivity, however – there are many other ways your DEX platform benefits land with a CIO or CFO rather than just an IT manager.
- Reduced support costs per employee – Automation + More Context = Less Tickets & Time To Handle Them. You get more out of each dollar spent supporting end users.
- Greater user satisfaction and retention rates – Nothing erodes engagement more than having tech against which they have no power.
- Friction = Frustration. More efficient change management – Your DEX data tells you exactly how changes made at a systems level affect real users in their own lives.
- Investment based upon experience data – You can upgrade your hardware when needed, instead of according to some arbitrary schedule.
- Defensibility of IT investments – The ultimate outcome metric leaders care about is hours spent being productive. A good DEX platform lets you see how much of this hour-by-hour is actually protected.
How to measure Employee Digital Experience
You could argue that DEX should be as simple as measuring whether employees feel satisfied using their company’s software. But we’re going beyond that here. At its simplest, a robust DEX strategy involves looking at 5 things:
1.Device/endpoint health
2.Application performance on those devices
3.Connectivity experienced by end-users
4. Sentiment towards these experiences
5.A composite score representing all three aspects above
These metrics give us insights into what our workers experience day-to-day, allowing us to make informed decisions around improving their experience. We can then take action accordingly – fixing problems identified through our measurement activity. This creates a virtuous cycle where improvement drives better measurements, leading to further improvements. That’s the whole point behind developing such a system!
Why Your DEX Implementation Partner Matters More Than the Tool
But getting there is no mean feat and requires a different approach to implementing and operating a successful deployment of DEX technology. As with other transformation initiatives, you can easily get bogged down if you’re missing out on key elements such as appropriate threshold settings, remediation playbooks and integration to service operations all leading to just seeing noise instead of insight. A true win-win situation sees organizations using their DEX investment as a way of establishing an operating model and not simply licensing some technology.
Ultimately, picking the right DEX implementation partner may be far more important than selecting the right technology provider. In short, you need someone who has the ability to provide a structured baseline and then build upon that by providing ready-to-go remediation playbooks, while integrating everything into your organization’s existing ITSM and endpoint tooling.
And of course, ensuring that everything stays on track through good ongoing management, delivering improvement to the DEX experience score. If an organization prefers not to invest in developing these capabilities themselves, perhaps they’ll consider investing in managed digital workplace services which incorporate DEX within a framework of providing proactive support and managing the end-user IT experience along with agreed productivity targets.
Your digital workplace was designed with this notion in mind, that technology will get out of the way, enabling your employees to do their job. But only if you have the right foundation for success. With Teceze’s DEX platform, we measure your end user’s actual employee experience, resolve friction points proactively, and link your IT efforts to increased business productivity , all while providing a clear view to your leaders.
The shift from reactive to proactive experience management has been established as a baseline requirement rather than a competitive differentiator when building today’s digital workplace.
Our experts design and run your entire enterprise solution for a Digital Employee Experience, including platform selection & implementation through fully managed digital workplace services. Are you ready to transform your employee workplace friction into quantifiable business productivity? Let’s talk! Talk to our team about getting a DEX Readiness Assessment.