Transforming the IT Help Desk Experience with Digital Experience Cloud 9.0.9
At Lakeside, we believe that end-user experience is the most important metric in IT. That’s why we built a platform to provide deep visibility into where that experience matters most: the endpoint. From this user-focused perspective, the tools, performance, and support employees need to do their best work become clear.
Over the past 15+ months, changes to how and where we work have raised the stakes for delivering exceptional digital employee experiences. Prior to the pandemic, C-level executives were less concerned about DEX, with 72% rating it a medium priority or lower. Now, with employees relying more than ever on digital tools for productivity, executives recognize the need for stronger DEX, with 90% ranking it as a medium to very high priority. (You can read more about these findings as well as others on the changing digital workplace in a recent market research report, conducted in conjunction with ESI ThoughtLab.)
To help address increasing pressure on IT to deliver incredible DEX for flexible workplaces, we are excited to announce the next version of our platform, which is designed to make realizing the productivity and cost-optimization benefits of DEM faster and easier than ever through new service desk features, usability improvements, and enhanced remote work management capabilities.
Along with accelerating our customers’ and partners’ DEX initiatives through product updates and strategic customer success programs, we are doubling down on our commitment to delivering the most holistic, secure, and scalable DEM cloud platform and introducing the name Digital Experience Cloud to refer to our collection of applications that provide value across a number of DEX-related use cases. Lakeside will continue to use SysTrack as the name for the underlying edge architecture that serves as the engine for the suite of Digital Experience Cloud applications.
Introducing Lakeside Assist — A New Application for More Responsive L1 Support
New in version 9.0.9, Assist is an all-in-one workspace for Level 1 service desk agents to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. It draws on the rich underlying analytics of the Digital Experience Cloud platform while only surfacing details relevant to L1 workflows.
Our market survey found that 84% of IT leaders consider reducing mean time to resolve (MTTR) important for improving DEX while 67% also consider faster first contact resolution a key DEX metric. Operating a service desk, whether internal or outsourced, can be a huge cost driver and productivity sink. By increasing efficiency at each level of the support chain, an organization’s investment can be much more rewarding. Assist will help reduce MTTR at the first stop most users make: Level 1. By empowering L1 agents to perform rapid root cause analysis with auto-detected issues and execute fixes with pre-configured automations, customers can save time and money by preventing time-consuming support escalations.
(INSERT VIDEO)
Assist is a hub for the L1 service desk that enables faster root cause analysis and remediation without requiring expertise in DEM.
Key Assist Features
- System selection: Search by user name, system name, IP address, or group filter to connect to the target machine.
- Detected issues: Access a list of triggered sensors, which show issues impacting the end user in real-time along with helpful descriptions of why and how to best address the problem.
- Auto-fixes: Run scripted automations configured by your IT department to immediately resolve the problem and improve DEX. Lakeside provides hundreds of factory automations out of the box written by experts and packaged by use case, making it easy to get started with relevant scripts that work.
- Performance and system details: Identify areas of concern, such as low DEX scores, full disk drives, high CPU, or weeks since last reboot.
- Surveys: Send surveys to gather user feedback and sentiment after resolving an incident.
- Automation tools: Run scripts independent of sensor-driven auto-fixes to resolve common issues, such as restarting services or disk cleanups.
Lakeside Assist for ITSM ServiceNow Integration
Customers using ServiceNow ITSM for incident management can reduce the time L1 agents spend switching between apps by leveraging the new Assist features within the ServiceNow interface. Lakeside Assist for ITSM is a certified ServiceNow store app that surfaces detected issues, auto-fixes, diagnostic information, and more right within the ticket the agent is working on.
Previous versions of this app were proven to help customers improve resolution times by up to 40% as well as reduce ticket volumes by an average of 18% as repeat issues declined. With the added enhancements of real-time sensors and automations right within the incident, customers will benefit from even greater outcomes.
Lakeside Assist for ITSM brings the power of Assist to ServiceNow incidents for lower MTTR and fewer repeat issues.
Updated Cloud Homepage to Navigate with Ease
Digital Experience Cloud users will have noticed substantial UI and usability improvements on their homepage. We’ve reimagined the cloud experience with more intuitive organization of core applications, fresh colors and icons, and quick links that feature a user’s most visited apps and dashboards as well as dashboards that a user has favorited. Additionally, we’ve improved the accessibility of our GUI so that more users can easily interpret dashboard visualizations.
With these updates, users can more clearly navigate within the platform and reduce time spent searching for the right toolset.
A fresh Digital Experience Cloud homepage allows users to easily access their favorite tools and dashboards.
New Capabilities for Proactive Support
Version 9.0.9 introduces sensor enhancements and a new Proactive Support Kit for administrators or desktop engineers to more easily identify and prevent new and growing problems.
- Save time with enhanced sensors: Sensors, a diagnostic tool for accelerated root cause analysis, have been augmented with an additional layer of granular insight within AIOps. As an example, a common question of the pre-9.0.9 sensor for application faults is a simple one: What application? With this enhancement, an admin can see the application name without needing to drill deeper and move on to the next phase of the resolution process. Other sensor details now visible within AIOps include: manufacturer name, disk drive, GPO, BitLocker protection status, BitLocker encryption method, and browser extension.
- Less complexity, more cost savings with the Proactive Support Kit: Many Digital Experience Cloud customers use the platform for proactive and predictive support, getting ahead of incidents before they impact DEX and productivity. The Proactive Support Kit is a custom set of content that any customer running 9.0 or above can download and use today for a unified view of areas that are helpful to examine during proactive investigations, such as critical app details, sensor trends, top faulting apps, top DEX impacts, and machine sizing.
Remote Work Management Improvements
Improving the remote or hybrid work experience remains a top priority for customers, and challenges persist around productivity, engagement, retention, and well-being. To help customers better support anywhere work, the Remote Work Performance Monitoring Kit has been enhanced with additional dashboards to provide a more intuitive workflow for visibility into the quality of remote workers’ digital employee experience.
This kit supports critical remote work use cases, including:
- Steady state remote work performance and experience monitoring
- Collaboration tool rollouts, adoption, and monitoring
- VDI sizing
- Hardware refresh/physical PC sizing
- Remote security and compliance
It allows customers to quickly understand the state of remote DEX; improve remote productivity, engagement, and collaboration; and enhance security and compliance while users work from home.
Getting Started
We look forward to working with you to realize the full benefits of digital experience management in the cloud. Current Lakeside customers can start the upgrade process for version 9.0.9 by contacting their customer success representative.
If you’re not yet a customer and would like to know more, request a demo to learn more about how Digital Experience Cloud can help you improve DEX and lower IT costs.
Subscribe to the Lakeside Newsletter
Receive platform tips, release updates, news and more