Technology doesn’t work in isolation — it’s only as good as its people, and how those people work with it. Understanding their challenges, frustrations, and moments of delight is the key differentiator between a reactive IT function and a transformational one.
Take the rating buttons at the self-checkout at Walmart, you hit one star, nothing happens – there’s no follow through, no experience management. You have no way to knowing why these people have said one star, or what to do to make their experience better next time. The KPI becomes meaningless — a missed opportunity to manage customer experience with.
That’s the problem with most feedback loops today: they collect data but fail to do anything meaningful with it. The disconnect experienced between signal and response isn’t just seen in retail, it’s playing out across IT organizations everywhere.
In fact, 51% of CIOs believe their organization provides strong emotional support during digital transformation, yet only 41% of their employees agree. If we’re not listening to how people feel about their digital environment, we’re missing the most important signal of all.
IT Metrics Miss the Most Important Signal
Most CIOs can tell you the technical issues going on in their environment. Far fewer can tell you how that interaction made the employee feel, and that’s where trust, engagement, and performance are won or lost. Remember that feelings aren’t just about love, needing a hug or some other softness. Feelings also include frustration, confusion, annoyance, obliviousness – emotions that can have a direct and measurable impact on a company’s bottom line.
Traditional IT focuses on what’s easy to measure: uptime, ticket volumes, SLAs. But these metrics are only half the story. They tell you what happened, not how it felt to the employee. And in today’s high-expectation workplace, that emotional signal is the most honest, underused, and strategically powerful form of telemetry we have.
Imagine a service desk that resolves tickets in under two hours, but users still describe the experience as “slow,” “confusing,” or “unhelpful.” That’s not success, it’s concealed frustration.
Sentiment Is a Strategic Capability
In my experience leading digital transformation across large, distributed organisations, I’ve learned that empathy isn’t a soft skill, it’s a strategic capability. And operationalising it at scale is not only possible, but also essential.
Sentiment tells us how technology performs from the only perspective that truly matters: the human one. When we embed micro-feedback prompts into key digital moments or better yet, talk directly to users, we uncover friction and frustration that never show up on a dashboard.
When combined with traditional telemetry, sentiment becomes a diagnostic tool. I've seen teams anticipate outages based on declining employee sentiment before a ticket is ever raised. That’s not just IT support; that’s IT acting as a strategic and proactive partner to the business.
Don’t Just Listen, Act
So, here’s the trap I see IT leaders fall into all too often, collecting feedback, then doing nothing with it. Like Walmart’s one-star checkout button, feedback without action, only leads us to a dead end.
However, a true sentiment-driven IT organization uses emotion as a trigger for action:
- When clusters of negative sentiment emerge, systems respond.
- When employees consistently rate tools as frustrating, we rethink, not just reboot.
- We move from SLAs (service-level agreements) to XLAs – experience-level agreements that measure perceived helpfulness, not just response times.
This is what modern IT leadership looks like.
Sentiment Is the CIO’s Business
The era of transactional IT is over. Today, IT leaders are culture enablers and productivity partners. These are emotional currencies, and sentiment is how we measure them.
Because when employees feel fatigue, friction, or frustration by the technology around them, the business pays the price in engagement, retention, and performance.
That’s why sentiment can’t be treated as a side metric, it’s the missing signal that completes the full picture. And if 51% of CIOs think they’re delivering emotional support during transformation, while only 41% of employees agree, that’s more than a disconnect, it’s a wake-up call.
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To learn more about how DEX principles and technologies were key to this transformation, register now for Martin’s session at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit in London: Big 4 Transformation Powered by DEX Insights, Automation & Adoption at Scale.