“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace” – Doug Conant, former Fortune 500 CEO, NYT bestselling author
Ever since the world was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise IT teams are constantly firefighting to get remote workers up and running with minimum disruptions to their workspace experience. Poor technical experience is often a leading cause of employee frustration. Further poorer user adoption to new technologies often translate to unhappy customers. Just how productive have organizations been ever since a large chunk of the workforce started working remotely? Some are doing significantly better than the others. If we look closely at the ones doing well, they have leveraged technology to improve employee collaboration, customer interactions and ensured the EUC environment is conducive to remote working.
These organizations invest more in technology for faster issues resolution. They make use of End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) platforms to maintain high system performance by taking proactive actions to fix anomalies, also notifying the users for proactive maintenance. EUEM products can bring in benefits to various personas within the organization. A self-healing platform helps the employees and EUC teams primarily in three areas.
For each of these areas, let us look at the problem at hand, the impact of no action by the enterprise, the solution offered by EUEM products and finally the value delivered to the enterprises.
Employee Productivity
The Problem
Every year, IT issues cost businesses millions of dollars in resolution and damage control. The truth is, only a small fraction of that money is spent on fixing the issues. A large chunk of the cost can be attributed directly to the productivity that is lost because of the issue. The biggest challenge with remote working is, optimizing the endpoint performance and the way employees experience technology.
Impact of no action
Lower employee productivity has a cascading effect on the organization. It has an adverse effect on customer service commitments. Technology downtime leads to poor employee experience which in turn leads to frustration and high turnover. The cumulative effect is massive revenue loss for the organization.
Solution
A self-healing agent on an employee’s device empowers them with automated remediation actions and guides them to proactive problem solving with timely alerts and recommendations.
Value
A huge relief for employee is less wait time for issue resolution and lesser disruptions during their normal workday. The self-heal, self-service approach helps keep the endpoints in good health and perform optimally. Reduced dependency on service desk for troubleshooting leads to lower trouble ticket volumes and fewer calls to L1 / L2 support engineers.
Endpoint Visibility
The Problem
The dynamic IT environment is filled with heterogeneous devices. Discovering, managing, and securing all the endpoints within the enterprise can be mind boggling. A complete visibility in EUC estate, with insights in user behavior and system performance are a big challenge.
Impact of no action
There is no formal mechanism to track digital transformation initiatives and its impact on the employee experience. The service desk is often shooting in the dark without proper Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on repetitive issues. Security and compliance status is anybody’s guess. Software and hardware refreshes are fairly ad-hoc and inefficient.
Solution
The EUEM products offer centralized dashboards that display real-time device and issue dynamics. The service desk gets a 3600 panoramic view of all the endpoints within the enterprise with drill-down reports on their health, compliance, usage, and performance. These tools often provide proactive recommendations and easy to consume RCA reports.
Value
A single valid source for the Service desk results in enhanced visibility in device performance and incident dynamics. They are in better shape to compare and validate performance of technology changes within the EUC environment. Devices are secured from threats, and vulnerabilities while the compliance policies are up to date. The Service desk find themselves feeling more confident in their approach to incident remediation. This results in reduced Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) and first response time. This significantly reduces the cost per ticket with fewer Service desk personnel fire-fighting every day.
IT Asset Costs
The Problem
Without an overarching view of the EUC estate, the IT teams simply lack data on hardware in use, software usage and associated licensing information. There is a loss of control over device refresh and replacement activities leading to unwarranted drain on IT procurement costs.
Impact of no action
Without any insights or timely recommendations, ad-hoc upgrades were adding operational costs every year. Under and / or over utilization of software licenses in commonplace has a direct impact on employee productivity and the bottom-line of the business.
Solution
The EUEM products empower the IT procurement teams with periodic reports on device health and recommendations on hardware upgrades to avoid potential failure and losses due to negligence. They help in tracking and monitoring software usage and underutilized licenses and assets within the estate.
Value
The IT asset costs can be rationalized with focus on maximizing utilization of software licenses and enterprise license agreements. Saving from unwarranted software, hardware refreshes could be diverted to larger strategic IT initiatives that help transform the organization and the way employees experience IT.
With remote working becoming an existential reality, focusing on employee productivity, endpoint visibility and controlling IT procurement costs could easily turn into competitive advantages for businesses wherever they stand in their lifecycle. EUEM products try to bridge the gaps in digital employee experience and act as true transformation and growth drivers. One can say with absolute certainty that one day EUEM products will evolve as an intelligent, personal workspace companion for employees.
