A great digital experience makes users feel valued and understood. Regardless of the platform, device or channel they use to achieve their goals. It has become a fundamental workplace requirement that every interaction be smooth, convenient, and effortless. Great user experiences keep the end user engaged.
According to a recent Forrester research report from May 2022, many users will never contact the helpdesk. No matter if they experience performance problems on their computers or with their cloud-based services like Microsoft 365. Instead, they will just continue to suffer in silence. They won’t report the problem and their issues will linger, forever.
IT operations groups have the responsibility to identify these employees and help them. And to spotlight these users it requires specific monitoring solutions for digital experience – tools that track their performance from their perspective, from their endpoint devices, and provide the actionable insights to identify the chokepoints causing the problems.
Why Digital Experience Optimization (DXO)?
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) was started as a way to gather information about how users felt with regards to the different technology they were using. Essentially, it was a survey method to collect feedback and user sentiment. This helped improve the interfaces with the applications they were accessing. Over time, those tools expanded to collect some performance data from corporate networks and computer speeds. But they still relied on survey information to gather their insights.
Fast forward to today’s environment with knowledge workers on the go, and it’s easy to see why those legacy Digital Experience Monitoring tools are lagging in business value. Many employees now work remotely, away from managed networks at a corporate office where performance monitoring solutions were viable. Those legacy monitoring tools have known blind spots when it comes to employees working outside of an office building. And it’s not reliable to measure a user’s digital experience based on pop-up requests to fill out an online survey. Many won’t. Most won’t.
Today’s new hybrid work structure allows employees to decide where they work (home office, ISP, Wi-Fi). And also how they work (preferred hardware). Sure, IT provides them with the options and means to connect securely, but most elements are now decided by the user. This includes their unmanaged networks and external ISPs. Because of this, true Digital Experience Optimization solutions are needed to provide data-driven insights to IT operations groups. They then can identify users with performance issues that require upgrades or fixes, no matter where they are working from. Remember, not all users will report their performance problems to the helpdesk.
Why is DXO More Important with Teams Working from Anywhere?
IT support has shifted from fully controlled to loosely connected. Users now have more freedom to choose where, how and when to work. This creates huge blind spots for IT operations groups. Especially when it comes to monitoring the performance and end-to-end digital experience for employees working remotely. And while IT operations might not own all the underlying, remote infrastructure, they still own the user experience.
With today’s cloud services deployed as critical communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, etc., a solid DXO strategy allows organizations to be agile and quickly identify issues proactively. It also allows IT teams to react quicker with faster response time. It’s time they need to research any reported issues and analyze the root cause. DXO allows companies to make calculated decisions based on the accurate telemetry data gathered from end-user devices. By leveraging endpoint performance monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, and network performance, among other things, the IT operations group has complete visibility into the digital journey for employee activity.
Leveraging the Power of Digital Experience Optimization
The implementation of Digital Experience Optimization (DXO) with an integrated solution will determine the best digital experience for every user. DXO solutions combine quantitative and qualitative performance data in a way that allows IT operations groups to isolate problems more efficiently and spotlight those users with performance issues that need to be addressed.
Enabling true digital experience optimization, the new age solution will provide a holistic and comprehensive approach to troubleshooting issues, both reactive and proactive. All the background data is organized and available in a single pane-of-glass. The solution provides graphical dashboards and simple drill-down reports that empower IT operations groups, including the helpdesk, to perform fast analysis and identify the responsible areas that are most likely causing the problems. Because knowing every metric, even every glitch, is not equal to being able to solve the problem.
Optimizing the Digital Experience for Your Employees
The goal for IT operations should be to proactively identify digital experience issues for their employees, quickly assess the problem and implement a fix. If they focus on supporting people, not machines, then everything comes into clarity. To achieve that they need the right DXO monitoring and troubleshooting tool to empower them.
Different groups within the corporation can benefit in a different way from this approach.
Help Desk – Faster Troubleshooting
IT support teams can easily map out what an average user’s journey looks like consistently. That aids Help Desk teams by allowing them to easily close in on the issue. Being alerted about users with potential problems and being able to isolate incidents to be analyzed in deep detail, saves time in the troubleshooting process.
DXO allows issues to become more evident, more traceable, and as a result, easier to solve. Instead of going through several loops and involving different support groups within the organization, the ability to make sense of all your data is a significant differentiator that allows the Helpdesk to save time and money.
IT Operations – More Flexibility
With cloud services being used daily for services like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, etc., a solid DXO strategy allows organizations to be agile and quickly adjust to what is going on. It also allows IT teams to react quicker on demand.
It liberates organizations from the constraints of traditional IT and, in the process, changes how IT works bringing more flexibility. With Digital Experience Optimization, IT leaders no longer must solve hundreds of puzzles to make their workplaces suitable for the digital workforce.
Human Resources – Best Employee Satisfaction
Inefficiency, delays, and broken communication can account for a significant deal of frustration and wasted time within a team. That can impact not only internal communications between employees but also external communication including interviews with new candidates and prospects.
DXO empowers users with more productivity. It also significantly increases employee satisfaction. Facilitated root cause analysis of endpoint problems impacting employees to prevent dissatisfaction, unnecessary irritation, and waste of time.
Research & Development – Saving Frustration
Nowadays, most development teams work remotely. The digital revolution, which started years ago and is nothing new for most technology businesses, is now an established reality for most research and development teams.
R&D is essential for growing and improving your business. And the daily exchange of information among themselves and with other teams is crucial to meet business needs. Inadequate quality in that process not only leads to loss of time but much worse. It also leads to team demotivation, loss of productivity, and deficit of innovation initiative.
Sales – Competitive Advantages
In sales, you may have only one opportunity to make an impression and win a deal. Especially in today’s hyper-competitive environment. And your customers expect relevant experiences in real-time, no matter the touchpoint.
Having a low-quality call or a poor cloud service for document sharing may have a significant negative impact on your business image.
Contacting your company should be a welcoming and effortless process, reaching out to your sales team should not be stressful. Anger is not an emotion you wish new clients to associate your enterprise with. Another impact of a negative communication experience with potential new customers is looking like a cheap company that takes shortcuts or that doesn’t give quality communication a priority.
Small and Middle Companies – Growing Business Faster
Improving Digital Experience Optimization is a crucial measure for organizations of all sizes looking to improve their digital experience maturity. With digital experience being a new battleground, organizations that effectively implement DXO solutions can dramatically improve their user satisfaction and business results.
Businesses practicing DXO focus on a data-driven view of their user. Understanding what motivates, thrills, and engages users, is key to making educated decisions. Especially, about what to optimize to deliver the best end-user experience. And any company can benefit from that.
DXO is essential to ensure that companies are continuously updating their understanding of their users and improving their business goals in the process.
Getting Started with Digital Experience Optimization
There are multiple business benefits that come from providing an excellent digital experience for your users. It helps with employee retention and with recruiting new talent. The millennial candidates in today’s workforce have expectations for modern technologies and flexible working locations. Forcing them to come into an office building regularly will be seen as a huge red flag. Unfortunately, a lot of companies fail to recognize the unique characteristics of millennials.
By providing a great digital experience with the “Work-from-Anywhere” culture, organizations can ensure they attract the top talent in their industry. Key benefits include the following:
- Higher employee satisfaction with flexible work locations
- Excellent IT system performance, no matter where you connect
- Faster adoption for new collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams
- Less calls to the Helpdesk about performance or connectivity issues
If you are interested in finding out more about our OfficeExpert TrueDEM solution and how it can help you proactively optimize the digital experience for your organization, please visit our overview page online, or sign-up for a trial.
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