Digital Employee Experience for Today’s Distributed Workplace

Digital employee experience (DEX) measures the quality of your workforce’s interaction with the technology they need to get their jobs done. Enhanced digital experience translates into increased employee engagement because workplace technology plays a fundamental role in productivity.

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Problems of modern working environments

Technology tools are as important to the modern employee experience as food, water, and shelter are to human existence. If you look at employee experience through the lens of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, technology tools sit at the foundation level, and when technology does not work, employees cannot function properly in their jobs.

Research and actual workplace experience overwhelmingly prove a major gap exists between what employees think of their digital experience, and the experience IT believes they are delivering. So why is this happening?

30%

of an employee’s overall experience is represented by technology.

80%

of IT issues go unreported.

of employees think their digital experience is fine and no improvements are needed

Lack of visibility
Superior digital employee experience starts with complete, user-based endpoint visibility. With changing and dispersed workforces, employees rely on their hardware, applications, and network connections to be performant and productive. IT needs full visibility and single source of truth to create a superior digital experience for their employees. IT cannot fix what they don’t know.

Old-world IT processes
Traditional help desks typically wait for incidents to be reported and then react to resolve them as quickly as possible. However, with up to 80% of employee IT issues unreported, such a reactive process is inefficient and often ineffective. Manual processes that may have worked in-person are insufficient for supporting remote an expanding workforce. Automation is key to support a superior digital workplace.

Siloed IT operations
Employees rely on their device performing properly for them to be productive. Service desk, application managers, infrastructure teams, and IT leadership need to work together to provide right-sized digital environments for employee productivity. Without modern tools, IT workflows are siloed and only a fraction of digital experience can be managed and improved.

To close the gap between employee experience and IT, organizations need a platform that can be used for any use case, anywhere, and on any device.

Core Elements of Digital Experience Cloud

1 – A foundation of complete user data

Accurate insights are impossible with incomplete data. Digital employee experience requires capturing the entirety of end-user experience from all endpoints on and off the corporate network. IT will have a holistic view of everything happening in their environment with frequently collected and granular edge-based telemetry data, unifying real-time data with historical context, incorporating user survey and engagement feedback, and doing so without compromising user privacy.

2 – Automate issue detection and actionable insights

Automated issue detection and insights help IT teams cut through the noise and view top issues in their environment. When IT teams can understand context, root cause, hardware and software utilization, inventory of assets, and DEX health impacts across the estate, they’ll be able to resolve issues and drive the business forward proactively and efficiently.

3 – Recommended remediation and actions

In addition to surfacing top issues in their environment, a DEX solution should help IT act on insights with the ability to mass-heal critical issues and automate self-healing remediation. Recommended remediations can also help IT with digital workplace planning by identify recurring issues with devices and software vendors.

4 – IT tools across multiple use cases that influence employee experience

From CIO to IT team members, there is a need for overarching visibility and a single source of truth. An all-in-one workspace enables organizations to manage operations more efficiently, from helpdesk through IT leadership. One DEX data hub for all levels of the organizations empowers IT to transform digital employee experience and improve IT agility.

THE FOUNDATIONAL LAYER

1. Complete experience data

By capturing the entirety of end-user experience, the Digital Experience Cloud provides IT with the most complete and accurate set of actionable data available. With thousands of metrics covering real-time experience, this visibility enables IT to bridge the digital divide between the digital experience employees need and the one they are experiencing.

THE INTERPRETATION LAYER:

2. Intelligent analytics

Leveraging real-time user experience data and artificial intelligence, Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud provides rapid root cause analysis and remediation by automatically identifying and resolving anomalies on the endpoint before they impact employee productivity. For more complex estate-wide issues, it empowers IT with the ability to deeply understand and proactively optimize the user environment with a single source of truth.

THE ACTION LAYER:

3. Unified, edge-based experience management

Built from the ground up as a cloud-native platform and optimized to be deployed wherever work is being done, the Digital Experience Cloud enables IT to take action and completely transform digital employee experience across the enterprise and add holistic operational intelligence to a broad range of use cases.

Employees Work Anywhere. Make Sure Their Experience is Improved Everywhere

Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud provides enhanced agility and efficiency to IT teams so they can shift from reactive to proactive IT and ensure a new a new era of edge-based devices are performant, reliable, secure, and always connected. By leveraging the power of this enhanced digital employee experience lifecycle, every organization will be able to address the following questions at all times:

What are the top 5 IT issues affecting the experience of my users?

How should my help desk operations be prioritized to be most effective?

Do my employees have the right technology to do their job?

Are my remote employees suffering from network connectivity issues?

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Digital Experience?

Digital experience (DX) is the quality of a user’s interaction with technology, such as workplace software, online stores, point-of-sale terminals, and other digital touchpoints.

Digital experience examples include the experience of using computers at work, navigating a website, or trying to buy a product online. Slow systems, crashing apps, or perceived difficulty with technology all affect the DX.

When measuring digital experience, relevant metrics include:

Availability and performance, which help to determine if a digital asset is available for use or functioning as expected.
Usability, which indicates if certain technology is useful and easy to use.
User sentiment, which takes into account the user’s subjective perceptions about the digital experience.

Digital experience is a broad category:

Digital employee experience (DEX) measures employees’ interactions with the technology they use at work.
User experience (UX) in design looks at colors, layout, navigability, and performance of a web page to determine how intuitive and efficient it is.
Digital customer experience (CX) focuses on the customer journey in digital channels, whether accessing a brand’s website, placing an order, or interacting with the company via chat bots, social media, and mobile apps.

What Is Digital Employee Experience?

Digital employee experience (DEX) is how employees perceive, interact, and engage with the technology they need to get their work done. According to Forrester’s Employee Experience Index, 30% of the factors influencing employee engagement are related to technology.

DEX is measured based on the performance of devices, applications, networks, IT service delivery, and end-user sentiment. Factors that affect the quality of employees’ interaction with workplace technology include connectivity issues, slow computers, system crashes, outdated hardware or software, and long incident-resolution times.

Understanding the technology needs of employees and how it affects them is critical to meeting business goals. According to Lakeside Software’s 2021 study about digital experience, C-level respondents believe that better DEX would bring 12.1% revenue gains to their organizations.

Improved DEX also contributes to:

Fewer disruptions and downtime
Increased productivity
Enhanced user satisfaction
Higher employee retention
Fewer support tickets
IT cost savings

What Is Digital Experience Cloud?

Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack, is Lakeside Software’s digital experience management platform. This cloud-based solution helps organizations to monitor, measure, and optimize their employees’s interactions with workplace technology. Popular use cases of Lakeside’s platform include help desk efficiency, digital workplace planning, VDI migration, IT asset procurement and optimization, and digital experience monitoring.

Digital Experience Cloud enables holistic visibility across the entire IT estate and accurately measures the entirety of the end-user experience, empowering IT to improve productivity and engagement across a highly distributed digital environment. That’s possible because Lakeside’s platform uses an ultra-lightweight agent to collect over 10,000 telemetry metrics every 15 seconds directly from the endpoint — whether physical or virtual systems — as well as end-user sentiment through surveys.

The platform’s Intelligent Edge architecture also uses machine learning to analyze this rich repository of experience data, assess performance, and automatically detect IT issues that require immediate attention. The support team has access to real-time and historical data, in addition to different types of insights, from the IT environment as a whole to in-depth diagnostics about a single machine.

Key applications within the platform include:

Lakeside Assist is an all-in-one workspace that enables Level 1 technicians to quickly diagnose and resolve incidents. Assist runs as a stand-alone app or integrated with ServiceNow ITSM.
Lakeside Prevent leverages the power of Lakeside’s comprehensive data collection, artificial intelligence, and automation to proactively detect and prioritize IT incidents before they escalate.

Lakeside Resolve provides enhanced IT visibility and efficiency. Automated root cause analysis and mass healing capabilities allow for prompt problem resolution and improved digital experience.

What Is Digital Experience Management (DEM)?

Digital experience management (DEM), sometimes referred to as end-user experience management (EUEM), is the process of monitoring, measuring, and optimizing users’ interaction with workplace technology. The goal is to deliver a seamless and secure digital experience to employees or customers, enabling them to be productive and engaged.

Slow internet connectivity, old computers, and constant system errors cause user frustration and contribute to lost productivity, higher help desk tickets, and IT costs. Digital experience management empowers support teams to prevent issues from happening and resolve incidents quickly, minimizing downtime and improving users’ digital experience and engagement.

Digital experience management solutions collect both quantitative and qualitative data (via telemetry metrics and surveys, respectively) to create a complete picture of the end-user experience from the edge. These tools also use machine learning to analyze data, predict IT issues, and automate resolution, helping to improve digital experience and optimize the support desk operations.

Findings from Lakeside Software’s research indicate that, for surveyed IT staff, the most valuable use cases for digital experience management include:

Root cause analysis and prevention
End-user productivity
Reduction in volume of it incidents and tickets
Desktop virtualization migration
IT automation via bots