The release of Nexthink’s Digital Experience Score earlier this year was an important milestone for the company and was the outcome of many conversations we had with our customers over the last few years. It has probably been five years since I first heard a customer talking about the need for metrics to address the challenges they were having in taking a more employee-centric approach to their business.
“We don’t know where we are”, one customer said to me, “we don’t know how well, or badly, we are doing, and we have no way to compare our progress against that of our peers”. Another customer had an even more basic frustration – “We lack a definition of experience, Yassine”, she said, “how do we know what great experience looks like? How do we identify our start point?”
“How do we know what great experience looks like? How do we identify our start point?”
When we reviewed the many conversations we had with our multiple stakeholders and customers, we found that these frustrations ran right through the organization – from boardroom, to second-level management and right through to front-line helpdesk and operational support. Our customers were firefighting daily – they were very busy taking multiple actions to address increasing incidents and raising helpdesk tickets. And yet, they felt they were acting almost randomly, with no consistent approach or path of action.
It was these challenges that prompted us to build an experience score into our solution – to take the hard data we were collecting from our customers’ endpoints, and to combine that data with ongoing user sentiment metrics, to provide a very clear and comprehensive measurement of how they were doing when managing employee experience in every aspect of their business.
The impact was far more rapid than we had anticipated. Our very first beta customer, a major global service provider managing over 100,000 customer endpoints, discovered significant issues with a key business application within a couple of days of implementing the score. Their traditional IT KPIs showed no issues, and yet when they drilled down, they saw significant employee dissatisfaction with the performance of an SAP application. A minor adjustment of network configuration addressed the issue quickly, and they saw overall user sentiment rise immediately.
Based on this initial success, the customer took the decision to put the experience score front and center in everything they were doing. The score became the KPI to drive everything, and they aligned every team on achieving an ongoing score improvement. Each team became highly efficient as they were focused on a single objective – the employee experience score. This allowed them to take a much more proactive approach and to avoid the daily firefighting that had so concerned them.
Another early customer noticed that they could not rely on a ticket being raised to identify poor employee experience. Often, an employee would decide to live with a problem, rather than engage with the IT helpdesk. Once they had deployed the score, these issues were quickly picked up as part of the user sentiment aspect of the score, and the team could take corrective action.
Both customers took a long-term view to improve the experience of their employees – they identified an end goal, they mapped out what needed to change, and they aligned their organizations around the journey required. This, I believe, will be the key organizational shift that the Digital Experience Score will support – the alignment of all stakeholders around a common goal, using employee experience as the key KPI for improvement, at all levels of the organization.
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