Case Study: Experience Management and Full Lifecycle Observability (FLO)

David Krauthamer • Staff Writer

Our customer, a leading insurance provider, was grappling with a notable decline in employee productivity. Known for its commitment to customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, it required a robust solution to restore and elevate its productivity levels so that its customer experience was not negatively affected.

Compucom’s Full Lifecycle Observability (FLO) framework underpins all our services. It’s not a standalone product or solution but rather an integration of advanced tools with a customer’s IT infrastructure and workplace technologies.

Through Digital Experience Management, which is a part of FLO, we were able to leverage telemetry and discovery data, find the issues, and rapidly respond. Our customer achieved a remarkable 10% reduction in the time employees are impacted by poor technology and a 20% reduction in workplace and software tickets.

The Problem

Our customer was encountering a series of issues that significantly hampered employee productivity. The primary challenge emerged after deploying an application software update, resulting in system instability and frequent crashes. These crashes were not consistently reported to the service desk, leading to prolonged periods of inefficiency and frustration for employees.

Additionally, simple maintenance tasks such as ensuring “Fast Boot” was disabled and Group Policy Objects (GPOs) were refreshed regularly were overlooked. These oversights posed security risks and led to issues such as incorrect printer mapping.

The Solution

After consulting with our customer, we created a plan using the experience management and full lifecycle observability analysis that are integral to all our services. By leveraging advanced telemetry and discovery data, we identified the root causes of the productivity issues and implemented targeted interventions to resolve them effectively.

Using telemetry data, we discovered that “application crash sensor” scores had spiked significantly, indicating a widespread issue with the new software. Further investigation revealed a problem with a DLL file within the program.

A new version was promptly deployed to resolve the issue and prevent further disruptions. Additional maintenance needs were also identified, such as ensuring GPOs were refreshed regularly and addressing Active Directory (AD) certificate expirations.

To address these issues, we implemented a low-cost solution that included a pop-up notification for users when their AD certificate was about to expire. This proactive approach allowed users to connect to the VPN and renew their certificates, avoiding potential disruptions.

Results

Our customer experienced significant improvements in productivity and overall employee satisfaction following the implementation of the solution. Some key metrics included:

• 10% Reduction in Impact Time: Employees spent 10% less time dealing with technology-related issues, allowing them to focus more on their core responsibilities.
• 20% Reduction in Workplace and Software Tickets: The number of workplace and software-related tickets decreased by 20%, reflecting a more stable and efficient IT environment.

The proactive measures and advanced monitoring tools we deployed led to improved experience scores. Employees faced fewer disruptions, resulting in a smoother and more productive work experience.

Conclusion

The results with this customer exemplify how our advanced Experience Management, as part of our Full Lifecycle Observability framework, and proactive maintenance can dramatically enhance productivity and employee satisfaction. By addressing the root causes of technology-related issues and implementing targeted interventions, we helped them overcome their challenges and achieve remarkable results.

Looking ahead, they aim to continue leveraging our expertise to maintain and further improve their IT infrastructure. This ongoing collaboration promises sustained productivity gains and a more efficient, satisfied workforce.

Ready to see how Compucom can transform your business? Contact Us to learn more.

The post Driving Enhanced Productivity and Employee Satisfaction with Discovery Insights appeared first on Compucom.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Healthcare organizations are up against it. They must deliver high-quality patient care, ensure compliance with regulations, manage complex IT infrastructures, and cope with internal and external stakeholders’ increasing demands and expectations.  

Two powerful technologies can help: Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and Digital Experience Management (XM) enable organizations to optimize IT operations and enhance Digital Employee Experience (DEX). Combined, they’re a remedy for what ails many healthcare organizations — inefficient systems and staff burnout — ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. 

How to Get Started with AIOps and XM  

As with all digital transformation initiatives, successful implementation of AIOps and XM requires a strategic and systematic approach. Here are some steps to follow:

1. Assess your current state: Evaluate your IT maturity, capabilities, and challenges, and identify your goals and priorities for AIOps and XM.
2. Choose the right tools: Select the best AIOps and XM solutions and vendors that suit your needs and budget and can integrate well with your existing IT environment and processes.
3. Implement and optimize: Deploy and configure your AIOps and XM solutions and monitor and measure their performance and impact. Continuously refine and improve your AIOps and XM strategies and practices based on data and feedback.

These steps can be challenging for healthcare organizations on their own. Implementing AIOps and XM is more complex than purchasing software. A managed services provider (MSP) with expertise in implementing and integrating toolsets within customers’ systems can be a great partner throughout the process, helping you gain the best ROI. 

AIOps and XM Defined 

AIOps is a set of tools and techniques that use AI, machine learning, and automation to analyze, monitor, and manage IT systems and processes. Implemented correctly, it can help IT teams reduce complexity, increase efficiency, and resolve issues faster and more proactively.

XM is a holistic approach that measures and improves how employees interact with and perceive the digital tools and systems they use daily. This helps IT teams provide seamless, user-friendly, and personalized experiences that boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention. 

By using AIOps to group related alerts using event correlation, the healthcare organization successfully reduces alert fatigue and improves incident management for their EHR system.

AIOps + XM Benefits: Monitoring and Improving IT Infrastructure Health

By combining AIOps and XM, healthcare organizations can achieve the following benefits:

• Reduced downtime, cost, and risk: AIOps can help IT teams prevent, detect, and resolve incidents that affect the availability and performance of critical IT systems and applications, such as electronic health records, telehealth platforms, and medical devices. It can also help IT teams optimize resources, reduce operational costs, and comply with security and privacy regulations.
• Improved employee satisfaction and performance: XM can help IT teams understand which digital processes are slowing down and frustrating doctors, nurses, administrators, and researchers. By enabling the collection and analysis of staff feedback, sentiment, and tool usage data, IT teams can identify and address pain points, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Enhanced patient care and outcomes: Together, AIOps and XM ensure healthcare IT systems and applications are reliable, secure, and user-friendly, helping staff become less stressed and more productive and efficient. This leads to better patient satisfaction, safety, and quality of care, as well as reduced errors, costs, and risks. 

Real-World Examples 

AIOps

• Challenge: A hospital’s IT team is inundated with alerts when the EHR system experiences a network outage that affects multiple servers and applications. Meanwhile, an incident that affects patient privacy is lost in the alert noise.
• Solution: AIOps helps IT teams cut through the noise. In this case, it would have grouped all the alerts related to the network outage into one incident and prioritized the data breach incident affecting patient privacy, assigning it critical status so it could be resolved quickly.

XM

• Challenge: A nurse needs to access patient electronic health records (EHR) on her tablet. She’s having trouble— the app is slow and unresponsive, and she must wait to view each patient’s information. It’s the end of her shift; it’s been a difficult day, and she’s exhausted and frustrated.
• Solution: Using XM, the IT team would have been monitoring the performance and reliability of the EHR app, proactively identifying and resolving any issues that could affect user experience. While her day full of caring for patients would still have been challenging, her experiences with technology would have helped maximize her efficiency in caring for her patients rather than adding to her burden. 

Compucom’s Matrix Platform  

We’ve designed our comprehensive portfolio of IT services around user experience and XM, and we’re an early adopter of AIOps tools and techniques. Our experience and automation platform — Matrix — combines AIOps and XM to drive transformation, innovation, and continuous process improvement throughout your IT environment, freeing up time for your IT team to focus on other critical initiatives that can further improve patient care. 

The post Optimizing Healthcare IT Infrastructure with AI appeared first on Compucom.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Healthcare urgently needs reliable, secure, and consistent connectivity. Disparities in rural versus suburban care, surging rates of chronic illness, and an aging population are just some of the reasons it’s critical to enhance healthcare efficiency and accessibility.

5G (the fifth-generation mobile network) has finally rolled out, and it’s spurring exciting healthcare innovations. Like a freeway with more lanes, 5G wireless cellular technology has higher capacity — and the potential to hit download speeds and ultra-low latency approaching that of a wired connection.  

The Benefits and Possibilities 

A hospital campus can be massive, with millions of square feet and multiple buildings. Ideally, clinicians can maintain network connectivity without dead spots as they move within facilities and from building to building — 5G networking solutions have this capability. The ability of 5G to transmit large amounts of data quickly and reliably means improvement for existing applications but also drives a lot of potential new use cases:

• Think of seamless video communication between doctors and patients without lag or buffering.
• Picture simulation of real-world situations such as surgeries, emergencies, or diagnoses in immersive AR/VR environments, providing better training opportunities with lower cost and less risk for a wider audience. 
• Imagine the real-time transfer of vital signs data from ambulance paramedics to hospital critical care staff or detailed pictures and HD videos from clinical equipment to a remote clinician for diagnosis.

Today’s workers often use up to four smart devices, which quickly adds up when multiplied by the number of hospital staff. The Internet of Things (IoT) is already big in the healthcare industry, with wearable devices and connected medical equipment helping to monitor patients and collect data. All these devices can make for a crowded network. With 5G’s increase in bandwidth, a massive number of high-speed devices can be connected. 

5G Public and Private Networks 

Public 5G networks, owned and operated by carriers, are generally available to everyone; they offer wider coverage and lower costs but don’t offer the same level of control and security as private networks.  

Privacy and security are top concerns in healthcare. Standalone dedicated on-premises networks isolated from public networks are one solution. Private 5G networks can be optimized for specific use cases and offer control, such as prioritizing network traffic to ensure bandwidth for critical applications. Another solution is using network slicing to create a virtual private instance (slice) of a service provider’s public network.  

• Group the alerts – for example, if the EHR system experiences a network outage that affects multiple servers and applications, AIOps groups all the alerts related to the network outage into one incident.
• Filter out irrelevant alerts, such as those expected due to routine maintenance or testing activities for the EHR system.
• Prioritize incidents based on their urgency, importance, or business impact. If the EHR system has some incidents that affect patient safety or privacy, such as data loss or breach, AIOps prioritizes these incidents and assigns them a critical status.

By using AIOps to group related alerts using event correlation, the healthcare organization successfully reduces alert fatigue and improves incident management for their EHR system.

5G Hybrid: Making 5G Fit Healthcare Use Cases 

Hybrid 5G networks use a mix of public and private infrastructure, allowing organizations to benefit from the strengths of both. For example, specific critical use cases could use the private network, while the public network could handle the less sensitive functions.

An example of a 5G hybrid network for healthcare has been developed at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). BCH originally wanted to upgrade its Wi-Fi capabilities; with a footprint of over 19 buildings and 3 million square feet (about the area of a large shopping mall), they chose a 5G environment to provide reliable connectivity anywhere within its system. Mission-critical applications were moved from Wi-Fi to 5G.  

Now, BCH’s internal secure network extends beyond its walls. As clinicians move between facilities, where before they would have lost Wi-Fi, they can now maintain their connection with the 5G network. The solution also provides connection across all their campuses and to remote practitioners. 

Compucom’s Recent Partnership with T-Mobile 

As tech leaders investigate 5G private networks to prepare for the future of healthcare, device readiness is a major consideration.

5G phones are now mainstream, and every year, more and more 5G native devices are released. Samsung and Apple offer 5G tablets, and 5G laptops are becoming increasingly available, with Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung all offering them as an option.

Learn how Compucom recently partnered with T-Mobile as part of T-Mobile Business’ Connected Laptop offering to keep workforces productive and connected. 

The post The Benefits of 5G to Healthcare appeared first on Compucom.

Troy Baldwin • Director, Offering Management

Good Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is more than a “nice to have” that will help retain and attract talent; it underpins many top business initiatives. Consider the priority of many businesses today: resilience — the ability “to deal with adversity, to withstand shock, and to adapt fast.”  

The Consequences of Not Championing Good Employee Experience 

Companies wanting to build resilience will adopt policies and systems to prevent sources of disruption, such as cybersecurity threats. But suppose no attention has been paid to DEX, and employees are saddled with a consistently poor user experience. Out of sheer frustration, they may start to cut corners, adopt risky workarounds, or use their unmanaged devices to get things done.

Not considering employee experience can, sometimes dangerously, undermine other critical policies and directly influence your customers’ experiences for the worse. Who hasn’t heard sighs of frustration or outright complaints as a customer-facing employee grapples with slow or subpar technology?

Prioritizing User Experience in DEX

Getting DEX right, so your workplace technology is all about the users, means good business outcomes will follow. Gartner predicts DEX and general employee experience will continue to rise in importance for companies. By 2025, they predict 50% of organizations will have established a DEX strategy, team, and management tool, up from 15% in 2022. 

Compucom prioritizes user experience across all our offerings to create the ideal experience for our customers’ employees by: 

• Understanding user needs: Understanding what your users need is the first step in designing a positive experience. We gather information about employees’ work processes, challenges, and preferences to create personas. Then we work with the customer to design a digital environment that aligns with these requirements. Finally, we use DEX tools to collect data such as telemetry and user sentiment, giving us a window into employee experience that would otherwise be missed.
• Providing consistency: Employees should have similar experiences across all digital channels and tools to avoid confusion and improve their experience. We specialize in getting the hybrid work environment right, and part of that is providing solutions to ensure employees stay productive as they move seamlessly between devices located in the office, home, and the field. 
• Offering choice and personalization: Personas are a solid starting point, but we recognize that maximizing user autonomy is an important part of good experience, so we ensure our offerings facilitate choice and personalization for your employees. From enabling device choice and “bring your own device” policies to having multi-channel support (voice, chat, text, self-service), we ensure that wherever possible, users are free to select devices and services that best suit their situation and preferences.
• Driving continuous improvement: Technology changes constantly and so do the expectations and needs of your employees. DEX should be a continuous improvement process so that it keeps up with the evolution of your business. Compucom uses Digital Experience Management (XM) across all our services to continuously measure, analyze, and improve how users perceive our services. 

Forget Taco Tuesday and Foosball

Put Employee Experience at the Center of Business Strategy

Burnout levels are high, and technology failures exacerbate workplace stress. Having XM to monitor DEX can identify pain points before they become an issue for employees, lowering stress levels. When employees have the right tools for the job that perform well, they’re less likely to cut corners and will have more time for the fun and challenging parts of their jobs, leading to greater job satisfaction. Your high-performing employees will be more likely to stick around. 

Our XM Focuses on Providing a Great Hybrid Employee Experience

Compucom’s XM collects useful user experience data, such as endpoint telemetry, service and support metrics, event sensors, targeted surveys, and user-sentiment analysis. We generate performance indicators from the data, which are then analyzed against Compucom’s four dimensions of a successful hybrid workplace, which all center around the user. We measure and improve how our services enable: 

• Technology-enabled workers
• Self-sufficient workers
• Well-supported workers
• Workplace flexibility

The User is at The Center of Everything We Do

To be their most productive and creative, your employees should feel empowered by their workplace technology. By partnering with an MSP such as Compucom, enterprises can offer greater choices to workers, enabling access to the devices and services that best fit their work style while allowing them to integrate personal technology easily and securely when needed. And the continuous improvement of our services through our XM ensures that as the goalposts for a great employee experience shift over time, we keep your users at the center of everything we do.

The post Effective DEX Prioritizes Users appeared first on Compucom.

Compucom Editorial Team

With hybrid work becoming the norm and workplaces more complex, good technology plays an even more significant role in employee productivity. At Compucom, we would add that so does accurately measuring, analyzing, and managing the impact of technology on employee effectiveness and satisfaction.

DEX and XM

Compucom’s Digital Experience Management (XM) uses endpoint analytics to discover insights into Digital Employee Experience (DEX) that may not be directly evident, allowing you to make the changes necessary to increase efficiencies and overall end-user satisfaction while keeping costs under control – critical aspects of modern-day business operations. This helps enhance and improve the end-user experience by providing:

• Real-time monitoring of employee devices: Helping IT teams identify and resolve issues proactively allows them to deliver the resources the employees need to work efficiently and effectively.
  
• Improved endpoint performance: Identifying and acting on employee device issues helps improve performance, reduce frustration, and enhance productivity; data analysis also allows you to identify trends and act on them as required.
  
• Personalized support and training: Analyzing employee device usage and identifying patterns may help indicate areas where additional support or training is required, allowing IT teams to assist individual employees and improve their experience and productivity.
  
• Enhanced security: Given the diversity of work styles and the persistence of talent shortages in IT, maintaining a positive technology experience for a hybrid workforce while ensuring strong security is critical; effective device monitoring helps IT teams to take corrective action, mitigate risk, protect sensitive data, and improve employee confidence in device security.
  
• Better decision-making: Leveraging the power of data and the insights it provides helps inform device provisioning, software deployment, and other IT-related decisions designed to optimize the digital employee experience and improve productivity and business performance.

Visibility into end-user experience and analysis of key indicators are significant advantages for enterprise organizations looking to drive transformation initiatives that not only attract and retain top talent but also deliver much-needed customer experience (CX) improvements.

The Crossroads of Employee and Customer Experience

Workers’ day-to-day interactions with technology sit at the crossroads of employee and customer experience and can dramatically influence how a company is perceived in the marketplace. Just consider the many employee warnings about operations that preceded the Southwest Airlines technology meltdown and the effect it had on their business and customers.

Each digital employee experience story is not linear; it’s complex, like a “choose your own adventure” book. The suitability of each employee’s work technology, along with their decisions and actions, turn the pages leading to success, failure, or the status quo.

Endpoint analytics helps us read between the lines of your employees’ interactions with technology across your workforce, providing the information to help you see the full story and make the right decisions to move your company forward.

It’s in the Details

At Compucom, we believe the accurate management and measurement of technology’s impact on your employee’s experience and improving their productivity is critical in helping your team meet and exceed their goals.

It’s been said that the devil’s in the details. According to dictionary.com, this means that “even the grandest project depends on the success of the smallest components.” Endpoint analytics allows us insight into some of the key, often overlooked details that, if not paid attention to, could possibly ruin your CX and DEX efforts.

We get it – we’re all about the details that help deliver results for our customers. Our focus on the employee experience, and Digital Experience Management, along with the associated endpoint analytics, is foundational to all we do.

The post 5 Ways Endpoint Analytics Enhance Employee Experience appeared first on Compucom.

David Krauthamer • Staff Writer

Experience Really Is Everything

As we conclude this blog series on Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and Digital Experience Management (XM), we’ll look at how to measure experience to discover areas for improvement to overall employee sentiment across an organization.

XM: Measuring DEX

This is the point in the conversation where many ask, “How do you accurately and effectively measure something that, in many ways, is subjective?”

While there is no industry standard or de-facto set of experience metrics, we’ve spent several years defining ours and determining what the “experience mathematics” should be. This has helped us determine what an ideal employee experience looks like, knowing that some of that is perception and that we can influence only specific aspects of the user’s experience.

XM: Traditional and Experience Metrics

Manage Service Providers (MSPs) trying to maximize the workplace experience often work toward operational metrics (SLAs) that don’t necessarily align with the end-user experience.

Traditional metrics that mostly measure service delivery and performance, when met, may not create happy users. In comparison, experience metrics measure the outcomes and value of managed services. They’re customized and aligned with user expectations based on a human-centric approach to managing business goals.

Digital Experience Management (XM) takes both types of metrics into account, allowing for better persona alignment and organization-based customization so that experience indicators can evolve into Experience Agreements (XLAs) based on deeper insights.

XM: How it All Works

So how does Digital Experience Management work? Here is an overview of the steps that make up XM:

1. Gather useful and accurate user experience data – endpoint telemetry, service metrics, event sensors, targeted surveys, and user-sentiment analysis
   
2. Generate performance indicators from the data
   
3. Analyze Compucom’s four dimensions of Digital Experience Management – geared to the hybrid workplace, to measure and improve how services are enabling:
   • Technology-enabled workers
   • Self-sufficient workers
   • Well-supported workers
   • Workplace flexibility
     
4. Develop insights from collected data – including the use of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) analytics
   
5. Take action to improve employee experience – service changes such as automation, knowledgebase content, self-serve responses, endpoint policies, and operational activities across the range of offerings

At Compucom, we’ve created an easy-to-understand dashboard view, based on these steps, for our customers. It shows how the four dimensions of XM, and their associated indicators, are performing at any given time in their organization and what actions can be taken to improve them.

The dashboard allows in-depth insight into employees’ technology experiences that has not been available before. Employers now have a view into employee sentiment, burnout, and frustration that was lost when the workforce went hybrid.

This greater insight into how best to fix potential productivity pain points, sometimes before the user is even aware of the issue, is crucial to improving and maximizing the employees’ workplace experience in your organization.

XM: What it Can Do for Your Organization

XM is about discovering actionable insights that deliver value to our customers so that they and their employees can reach their full potential, helping them:

• Improve employee productivity through expedited issue resolution and optimization of IT Services
• Understand how endpoints, applications, and related workplace infrastructure are performing end-to-end
• Boost endpoint health and longevity through automated remediation and scheduled maintenance
• Elevate the support experience with Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled automation and insights for root cause identification, improvement, and issue resolution
• Optimize cost savings through right-sizing and enabling performance-based refreshes

XM: Experience Really is Everything

If our over 35 years of experience in the IT managed services industry has taught us anything, it’s that experience really is everything. That is why we believe that Digital Experience Management (XM) should be the bedrock that any effective Digital Employee Experience (DEX) initiative is built on.

The way we see it at Compucom, the end user is at the center of everything we do. To be their most productive and creative, your employees need to feel comfortable with the technology they use at work.

By partnering with an MSP such as Compucom, enterprises can offer greater choices to their workers. Our offerings enable access to the devices and services that best fit their work style, while allowing them to integrate personal technology easily and securely when needed.

The Digital Experience Series:

• Digital Experience Management: What is It, Why it Matters
• Digital Experience Management: The Role of Technology
• Digital Experience Management: The Role of Support

The post Measuring and Improving DEX with Digital Experience Management appeared first on Compucom.

David Krauthamer • Staff Writer

Self-Service and Expert Support

Previously, we introduced the four dimensions of Digital Experience Management (XM) that Compucom has identified and how effective management through data gathering and analytics can help to create the ideal hybrid workplace for your employees.

These four dimensions are divided into two main categories: technology-based and support-based. Our last blog looked at the two technology-based dimensions of XM: Technology-Enabled and Workplace Flexibility. This blog will explore the support-based dimensions of Self-Sufficiency and Well-Supported.

These four dimensions can be divided into two main categories: technology-based and support-based. Let’s begin by looking at the two technology-based dimensions of XM: Technology-enabled and Workplace Flexibility.

DEX: How Different Support Models Affect Experience

From the CEO to the mailroom clerk, like it or not, you’re going to occasionally need IT support — and likely when you can least afford the interruption.

When we make a support request, we’re looking to rapidly regain control through a comfortable support experience that fits the urgency level. Fortunately, IT support services come in a variety of flavors to suit different preferences. There are support channels to accommodate everyone, from the DIYer who thrives in forums and search engines to the not-so-tech-savvy senior manager who calls the “IT Guy” for almost everything.

With the prevalence of hybrid and remote work, IT support touches almost every area, from hiring and onboarding to the offboarding process. Support models have evolved to ensure that every touchpoint along the employee journey creates the right experience for employee retention and productivity.

It’s about keeping your employees happy. Whether driving self-sufficient support or providing expert high-touch experiences, XM measures, analyzes, and ultimately offers service improvements throughout your employees’ tenure.

Support: Self-Sufficiency Drives Productivity

Self-sufficiency means different things to different people. Some of us DIYers like to do everything ourselves, while others just prefer easy access to help when needed. No matter how a person uses self-service support solutions, their goal is maintaining productivity.

Determining how well self-service support drives end-user self-sufficiency requires asking and answering some key questions:

• Do your employees have quick and easy access to self-service support solutions?
• What is their perception and satisfaction with the self-support solutions your organization provides?
• Are the self-service support options effective in restoring optimal productivity and increasing job satisfaction and loyalty to your company?

For today’s hybrid employees to work efficiently, they must have easy access to trusted self-service technical help through their preferred channels (apps, knowledgebase articles, forums, or AI-enabled). Having a robust selection of easy-to-use support options that enhance self-sufficiency will go a long way in keeping your people happy and productive.

Support: A Great Support Experience from Day One

Making sure your workers are well-supported shows them they are valued; it demonstrates your belief in their ability to succeed when given the right tools, such as readily available expert guidance when they need it most. And this should start from day one.

Troy Baldwin, Compucom’s Director of Digital Experience Management, when asked about the importance of providing employees a great experience from day one, said, “I’d put it right at the top. We commissioned a survey last year that found user frustrations with technology had caused more than 60% of those asked to look, apply, or leave for other jobs, and 12% of enterprise respondents actually switched. So, is it important? Yes.”

To help determine how well-supported your employees are, XM analyses key experience indicators based on these questions:

• How was your onboarding experience?
• What has your experience been like for your device lifecycle services?
• When engaging expert support, how was your support experience?
• How do you feel about the overall experience from beginning to end?

These questions and the indicators associated with them help us to understand and improve how users consume and perceive IT services without having to repeatedly tap them on their shoulders to ask: how’s it working now?

Four Dimensions. One Great Experience.

Compucom’s focus is helping our customers achieve a productive, distributed workforce, and Digital Experience Management is one way we achieve this. By harnessing the power and insights of key experience indicators, we are able to drive employee productivity and satisfaction.

But don’t just take our word for it; Gartner also understands that “near real-time processing of aggregated data from endpoints, applications, employee sentiment, and organizational context helps surface actionable insights” that help drive continuous improvements.

In our next post, we’ll bring the Four Dimensions of Digital Experience Management together and find out how implementing XM foundationally across managed services and solutions is a win-win for employers and employees.

The Digital Experience Series:

• Digital Experience Management: What it is, Why it Matters
• Digital Employee Experience: The Role of Technology
• Measuring and Improving DEX with Digital Experience Management

The post Digital Employee Experience: The Role of Support appeared first on Compucom.

David Krauthamer • Staff Writer

DEX: Productivity, Access, and Continuous Improvement

In our previous blog, we introduced the four dimensions of Digital Experience Management (XM) that Compucom has identified and how effective management through data gathering and analytics can help to create the ideal hybrid workplace for your employees. They are:

• Technology-enabled
• Workplace Flexibility
• Self-Sufficient
• Well-Supported

These four dimensions can be divided into two main categories: technology-based and support-based. Let’s begin by looking at the two technology-based dimensions of XM: Technology-enabled and Workplace Flexibility.

Having a clear understanding of each will help us answer two very important questions about the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) in your organization:

• Can your employees work how they want, and do they have what they need to be productive?
• Can they be productive and secure, regardless of work location?

Technology: Enabling the Experience

Technology is a catalyst of innovation; it has brought some of the greatest advancements in human history. And technology is what all companies and their employees depend on each and every day to get work done. Technology is a great enabler.

But users need to feel comfortable with the technology their employer provides. Thankfully the technology landscape has evolved to a point where organizations can often provide more device choices to their workers. This allows users to access the devices, data, and services that best fit their work style and needs while allowing them to easily and securely integrate personal technology when needed.

This is what it means to be Technology-enabled. And managing this dimension means understanding and learning from the insights gathered from employees’ experiences with their applications, devices, virtual machines, and connectivity.

Technology: Driving Workplace Flexibility

The sudden shift to remote work brought on by the pandemic gave employees a taste of the work-life balance they’ve always wanted. Companies must take this into account, providing what their employees want or risk losing them to a company that will.

Whether your organization has a hybrid, flexible, fully remote, or mixed workplace model, you must ensure your employees have easy and secure access to the technology and services necessary to be productive. Basically, make workplace flexibility easy for the employee while securing your company’s assets and data – making sure that the highest level of security is always maintained and that it does not affect the productivity and collaboration capabilities of your workforce.

As part of the Technology-enabled dimension of Digital Experience Management (XM), we work to answer questions like:

• Do users have access to the same digital tools and peripherals at home or in the office?
• Do users have access to the data they need (via cloud or VPN) to do their jobs no matter where they are?

Analysis of these and other key experience indicators allows us to drive consistency and relevant service improvements across our managed services, ultimately resulting in a better user experience regardless of location.

End User and Digital Experience Come First

Enabling your employees with the right technology to be productive and ensuring they are able to work from any location are critical factors in their digital employee experience. Like any other key business initiative, effective measurement, analysis, and management are necessary to achieve the results you are looking for.

At Compucom, the digital employee experience is central to everything we do. All of our solutions and services are designed and implemented with an end-user-first mindset. Any data we can gather and analyze creates opportunities for continuous service improvements (CSI), resulting in a better overall experience, increased productivity, and happy employees who want to come to work every day and do their best.

In our next post, we’ll look at the remaining two of the Four Dimensions of Digital Experience Management – the support-based dimensions of XM: ensuring workers are Self-Sufficient and Well-Supported.

The Digital Experience Series:

• Digital Experience Management: What it is, Why it Matters
• Digital Experience Management: The Role of Support
• Measuring and Improving DEX with Digital Experience Management

The post Digital Employee Experience: The Role of Technology appeared first on Compucom.

David Krauthamer • Staff Writer

The Significance of Experience

No matter where we go or what we do, in the real world or online, the anticipation and expectation of a good experience are what draw us. Every day, with the swipe of a finger, access to all the world’s knowledge and the experiences of others drive our decision-making, thoughts, and actions in both our work and personal lives.

For businesses, since the pandemic, experience has taken on new significance, adding additional layers of complexity to an already shifting landscape. Two of the most important and often confused experience areas for companies are Employee Experience (EX) and Digital Employee Experience (DEX).

EX vs. DEX

While EX and DEX are complementary and there’s overlap between the two, the main difference is the business unit responsible. EX is more often associated with the Human Resources (HR) aspects of an organization, while the responsibility for DEX lives with IT.

EX is all about how an employee thinks, feels, and ultimately succeeds throughout the entirety of their journey with an organization – it’s about every touchpoint. DEX, according to Gartner, “focuses on how technology affects the total employee experience.” As an IT managed services provider (MSP), we live this every day.

Managing the Digital Experience

At Compucom, we believe that technology and technology support have the power to make or break the employee/end-user experience. That’s why we have invested in tools and technologies designed to efficiently and effectively manage and improve our customers’ digital employee experience.

Our term for this is Digital Experience Management (XM). XM focuses on continuously improving DEX through the monitoring and in-depth analysis of employee interactions with technology and technology support. This data provides actionable insights that allow us to recommend, implement, and improve DEX for our customers.

The Four Dimensions of Digital Experience Management

XM focuses on improving productivity, collaboration, and the overall satisfaction users have with digital workplace technologies. These improvements have a direct effect on the total EX within an organization.

Compucom identifies four major dimensions of XM that provide the data and insights to drive measurable results and service improvements for the ideal hybrid workplace. They center around making sure employees feel:

• Technology-enabled: they are able to work the way they want and have what they need
• Self-Sufficient: they have the ability to complete most tasks independently
• Well-Supported: they have the support they need, when and where they need it
• Workplace Flexibility: they can be productive and secure, regardless of work location

Each of these dimensions presents an opportunity to measure and improve an aspect of an employee’s experience and drive service changes that directly improve DEX/EX across the full range of our workplace services – including Digital Support, Device Lifecycle, Infrastructure, Cloud and Security, and Enterprise Endpoint Management.

Putting Experience First

Even before the pandemic, employee experience was a hot topic. Now, with the rapid pace of change and the distributed workplace/workforce, experience has become a top priority of forward-thinking organizations.

At Compucom, the end user and their digital experience always come first. That’s why we make Experience Management a part of everything we do, helping you to get the most from your technology and talent investments.

Thank you for reading the first blog of our Digital Experience Management series. In our next post, we’ll dive deeper into the “Four Dimensions of Digital Experience Management,” starting with the technology-based dimensions of Technology-enabled and Workplace Flexibility.

The Digital Experience Series:

• Digital Experience Management: The Role of Technology
• Digital Experience Management: The Role of Support
• Measuring and Improving DEX with Digital Experience Management

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The Best Device Experiences for the Hybrid Workforce

No Turning Back!

Hybrid and remote work models are not going away. While there’s been a push to return to the office this year, and the average city office occupancy rates are over 50% for the first time since the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reports those numbers have now stalled.

The percentage of companies requiring full-time office work dropped in the past few months from 49% to 42%. Employee preference is clear: 98% of respondents in a recent poll would like to work remotely, at least some of the time, for the rest of their careers.

While employees happily welcomed the benefits and relief of the new remote and hybrid models, companies have had to contend with the technology management concerns of the new highly distributed workforce. During the pandemic, many businesses scrambled to adapt what they had and add cloud-based technology and tools to manage endpoints and aid productivity.

But now, as the dust settles, how can companies more effectively manage and secure local, remote, and hybrid devices while reducing the cost and complexity of device management?

The Challenges

Managing devices in a hybrid world means more than just keeping them current and secure. Here are the major areas a good solution must address:

• Device diversity
• Security risks
• User privacy concerns
• Application management
• Compliance and regulatory requirements
• Change management
• Scalability
• Performance

While addressing these concerns, organizations should ensure their device management strategies and solutions stay current with the latest workplace technology and the evolving threat landscape.

But if these were not enough on their own, there is a bigger challenge — employees are demanding better digital experiences. How do we address all of these and …oh yeah…reduce costs too.

The Unified Endpoint Management Experience

Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) can play an important role in enhancing the device experience because it inherently supports the remote paradigm, enables device diversity, integrates with security compliance solutions, and more closely integrates into broader aspects of the device lifecycle, such as device procurement, build, and support. With a 100% cloud footprint, endpoint management solutions will also lower costs by eliminating on-premises management infrastructures and simplifying management processes.

So, perhaps the time has come to bite the bullet and go with the Unified Endpoint Management solutions that have been slowly making ground across the enterprise.

Our Product Management Director, Trevor Kemp, says, “Most large enterprises’ endpoint management solutions remain in co-managed mode, with UEM and on-premises solutions sharing the workload. However, with the need to improve device experiences, improve device choice, and lower costs, we see increasing pressure to adopt cloud-based unified endpoint solutions that are less complex and are integrated into a more flexible cradle-to-grave device lifecycle”.

How can UEM contribute to the device experience?

• Device choice – Windows, Macs, and mobile devices
• Streamlined device onboarding – Automating device provisioning and configuration simplifies the onboarding process, ensuring that users can quickly start using their devices without any hassles.
• Compliance and security – UEM can provide efficient security features such as device encryption, data loss prevention, and remote wipe capabilities. By enforcing compliance policies and securing endpoints, you can ensure a secure digital experience for all end users.
• Self-service capabilities – Self-service portals and app catalogs allow users to update or install applications on their own. This helps users customize their experience and not have to rely on IT for routine tasks.
• Application management – Administrators can ensure that all users have access to the appropriate applications and updates, reducing disruptions within the digital experience caused by outdated or missing software.
• Personalization and user preferences – Personalization settings and user preferences across different devices ensure a tailored and consistent digital experience for users regardless of the type of endpoint.
• Performance analytics – Performance monitoring capabilities allow IT administrators to track performance metrics and identify potential holes. By proactively addressing performance issues, organizations can ensure a seamless and satisfactory digital experience for users.

Shifting away from traditional on-premises endpoint management solutions is hard. Adopting a co-management approach and shifting workloads to the cloud over time is the order of the day but has added management complexity and cost.

It’s now time to invest in the next step…

Partnering with a company that can manage the entire lifecycle of every IT device in your organization, from procurement to retirement, is a win because it allows you the space and time to focus on your employees’ digital experience and, ultimately, grow your business.

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