Real-time feedback is the key to improving the digital experience

Companies are always looking for ways to optimize their business performance and customer success. Realizing that employee satisfaction is critical to advancing business goals, many companies are taking a stronger look at their employees' digital experience.

Team members who are unhappy with technology that is supposed to help them do their jobs are less productive and more likely to leave an organization than employees who are happy with the technology stack. But, as hybrid work has become the norm, IT departments have had a harder task monitoring their employees’ digital experience.

To provide greater visibility into the employees' digital experience, some organizations are turning to flexible, tailored, system-generated surveys that extend across devices and locations. These surveyscan efficiently capture real-time feedback from employees, wherever they are, helping IT teams identify areas that need improvement and target ways to optimize the digital experience. By capturing real-time responses, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of subjective employee satisfaction that, combined with objective application and performance data, allows them to accurately assess the company’s IT health and identify ways to improve productivity and business performance. Below are three ways companies can gain visibility into both subjective and objective measures of digital experience and turn insights into action.

Gain employee digital buy-in

Employee acceptance of new technology and processes is critical to the success of digital transformations and, therefore, a company’s bottom line. Research has shown that the employee experience has a significant impact on both the customer experience and company revenues.

Gaining clear, accurate insights into employees’ digital experiences can help companies measure the digital transformation’s progress, and real-time surveys are essential to providing those insights. For starters, customized surveys targeting specific user groups will help foster trust among employees and increase response rates, which adds to the surveys’ accuracy.

A platform that integrates the technical telemetry from the IT infrastructure with survey response data is then capable of analyzing responses according to specific attributes, providing an organization with the information it needs to address employees’ concerns, which in turn accelerates the adoption of new technologies and initiatives.

Implement experience-level agreements that enhance the employee experience

Companies would also benefit from implementing experience-level agreements (XLAs) -- a variation of service-level agreements that focuses on the employee experience -- and using them to understand the effect technology and processes have on productivity. Traditional SLAs tend to focus on the technical aspects of a technology or service (such as average response time or other performance indicators), while XLAs focus on the user’s overall experience (such as whether users have the tools they need, or how long it takes to find a requested document).

Along with real-time surveys, XLAs allow a company to clearly assess users’ levels of satisfaction and identify trends, such as which applications are being used the most and why certain users or groups prefer one application over another. By correlating qualitative feedback on employee satisfaction with quantitative metrics on device and application performance, IT and line of business leaders will be able to make informed decisions on improving policies, prioritizing investments and identifying skills gaps. 

Understand how real-time insights lead to long-term results.

Employee performance and business success these days depend heavily on the digital experience of customers, who regularly interact with companies online. And the customer experience depends just as much on the employee experience.

Understanding an employee's level of ease and satisfaction with digital integration will allow companies to assess which tools and processes are paying off, which are causing delays or other issues, and what solutions are needed to move forward. As companies seek to implement streamlined tools for employee feedback, they will in turn be able to better adapt their employee’s digital experience as needed. Placing a high value on this experience can lead to higher employee satisfaction and, in turn, customer success.

An optimal digital experience helps businesses achieve their bottom line.

If companies want to achieve their business goals and increase their value to customers, they must first look inward. Companies must consider tailored solutions for real-time employee feedback that give them a specific understanding of employee sentiment and IT health. As companies take actionable steps toward gaining employee buy-in and implementing real-time feedback tools into their workflow -- with the understanding of why it matters for their overall business performance -- they will begin to improve employee satisfaction and productivity, leading to optimal business success for the future.

Image credit: fizkes / Shutterstock

Mike Marks leads Riverbed's product marketing team, and is responsible for sales enablement, go-to market planning and execution, and thought leadership. Before joining Riverbed, Mike held senior roles in marketing, business development, and product marketing in the cloud, managed services, and service assurance teams of Aternity, CA Technologies, Concord Communications, 3Com and Pacific Bell. A graduate of Brown University and Stanford Graduate School of Business, Mike also spent eight years as a submarine officer in the United States Navy. A competitive triathlete and recovering ultra-runner, he lives outside of Boston.