Are you considering investing in a digital employee experience (DEX) solution?
DEX management technology has skyrocketed in popularity over the past several years, and for good reason. Since the emergence of remote and hybrid work as a permanent workplace norm, the growing importance of managing the digital workplace – both from a technology and a human standpoint – is undeniable.
But while many DEX management solutions can appear similar at first glance, there are subtle but critical differences in the capabilities these providers offer. So the question is: what criteria should you use to evaluate these solutions in order to invest in the tool that’s the best fit for your enterprise?
What Are DEX Tools?
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools provide organizations with a deeper understanding of their employee’s experiences with digital workplace technologies. These platforms enable end user computing, digital workplace, and other enterprise IT teams to evaluate their technology ecosystem – not only by technical performance, but by the actual experiences that employees have as they use the technology.
These tools work through agents deployed on all employee devices which gather real-time telemetry data from the devices’ hardware, network connections, and business applications. While the real-time analytics they generate enable IT teams to find and fix issues faster, that is only one of the many benefits DEX technology can provide.
When used correctly – and with the right tool for your workplace’s unique needs – DEX management technology can completely transform your digital workplace, driving cost-efficiency while enabling employees to have more productive, happier experiences each and every day.
The Top 5 Capabilities to Look For in DEX Tools
1. See
A DEX tool must have robust telemetry collection capabilities that allow you to see issues as they arise on any endpoint, across the entire enterprise. Put simply, you can’t fix what you can’t see. The telemetry capabilities of a DEX solution allow you to go beyond incident tickets and identify issues which users either aren’t reporting or haven’t yet noticed, but still have the potential to derail business productivity.
2. Diagnose
Being able to see issues is one thing, but understanding the cause – not only superficially, but the true root cause – is vital to the overall success of your incident management strategy. For example: let’s say an employee submits a ticket related to an issue with Microsoft Teams that is preventing them from joining meetings. A DEX tool will be able to diagnose the root cause of that issue and immediately identify all other affected employees. That way, you can fix the issue not only for the reporting user, but for any employee who is at risk of experiencing the same problem.
3. Remediate
Remediation is a vital capability in a successful DEX solution. A healthy digital workplace is one in which problems are not only fixed, but prevented from reoccurring. After identifying and solving issues that impact employees, a DEX management tool enables your IT team to automate and scale fixes across the enterprise, so that in the future, you’re able to eliminate the issue in the “background” of employees’ experiences – before they ever know the problem exists.
4. Combine Qualitative & Quantitative Data
Digital employee experience is about more than the technical performance of an employee’s device. Getting the full picture also relies on an IT team’s ability to understand the sentiments employees express about their technology. Do they understand how every application works? Do they often get frustrated with a certain tool’s performance or user experience? Are they often experiencing minor issues that aren’t drastic enough to report, but still impact their productivity?
The best DEX solutions give you the ability to collect this qualitative sentiment data and combine it with technical data to get deeper insights that guide your strategic decisions. The classic optional employee survey doesn’t cut it in today’s complex digital workplace. An effective DEX solution enables IT to deploy personalized engagement campaigns directly to employee devices, gathering valuable sentiment data that will illuminate blind spots in their approach to incidents, provisioning, self-help education, and more.
5. Benchmarking
Lastly, the top DEX tools give you a combined metric that reflects all the data collected across the enterprise–both qualitative and quantitative–and allows you to set clear benchmarks, so that you know where you’re starting from, where you want to go, and can measure and articulate your progress to leadership every step of the way.
DEX technology might have seemed like a cutting-edge, new phenomenon years ago. But now, as companies recognize DEX as a fundamental element of their business’s success, the marketplace has become crowded with more and more providers of DEX management solutions. And although we know which solution we’d recommend, you have plenty of options as you begin your search. Whichever you choose, use these five capabilities to help decide whether the tool you’re considering will really be able to provide the value and outcomes you need.
