Technology plays an important role in almost every job, whether it's a customer-facing or an office-based position. When you use digital tools appropriately in the workplace, they can greatly improve productivity. However, confusing user interfaces and complex workflows can lead to errors, frustration, and reduced morale.
If you’ve ever found yourself fighting with older tools like Lotus Notes or Remedy, you’ll understand how much of a difference a user-friendly UI makes. That's why businesses are starting to focus on their digital employee experience (DEX).
DEX refers to the interactions employees have with workplace technology. It accounts for the performance of employees' devices, applications, and networks, along with how intuitive, accessible, and effective the user feels those tools are. Good DEX helps employees stay informed and productive, which makes them feel supported.
If the employee tech stack is an afterthought, and team members find themselves wrestling with legacy IT or new systems that are poorly integrated and not well-documented, it could create a poor digital employee experience.
Not only does poor DEX cause more work for your IT department as it supports confused and frustrated users, but it also leads to reduced employee morale, lower retention rates, and poor customer experience, as your team's productivity and effectiveness decline.
What is digital employee experience?
Digital employee experience refers to how your employees interact with the digital tools, technologies, and platforms provided by your organization. This includes the tools they use in their day-to-day workflows.
Every digital technology an employee interacts with is a part of their DEX, including:
Employee training platforms
HR tools for onboarding/leave requests
Internal communication tools
Company-managed mobiles and other devices
VPNs and credential management tools
The digital employee experience goes beyond the user experience of individual applications or tools. It considers how an employee interacts with all the tools used by an organization in a given day.
As Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms become common, filling roles ranging from office suites to CRM and ERP tools, digital workflows are becoming increasingly complex.
If you have employees who work remotely, that adds to the challenge since they rely on IT even more, and need to pay more attention to security. Add in the expectation that employees will use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation for routine tasks, and DEX gets even more challenging.
Employees may find themselves working on the go with a laptop or mobile device, and they often have to juggle a VPN and multiple login credentials. Investing in training, documentation, and systems to simplify the management of these tools is crucial for creating a good digital employee experience.
Measuring the digital employee experience
Taking the time to rethink the digital employee experience is a good investment in your organization's future. However, quantifying the digital employee experience can be challenging because it's so subjective. Many companies are aware of the challenges a complex digital environment can pose, but struggle to evaluate their efforts to improve it.
Evaluate your DEX by considering metrics from productivity analytics, such as:
Time to onboard new hires
Support ticket resolution times
Employee retention/turnover
Tool adoption rates
Workflow friction
One useful way of finding areas for improvement is to track tool adoption rates in your workplace. This can be helpful for more than evaluating the digital employee experience, especially in medium-sized or large organizations, since it can highlight things like:
Shadow IT practices
Unnecessary task switching
Friction points in your main workflows
Security risks
There are four key DEX challenges to address, and having an awareness of the metrics and issues listed above can help you understand these challenges and find ways to address them in your organisation.
Challenge one: Burnout and the "happiness" factor
Confusing, slow, or error-prone workflows and repetitive tasks can lead to employee burnout. In 2024, poor employee engagement cost organizations $438 billion in lost productivity. How much revenue are you leaving on the table due to a poor employee experience?
Streamlining digital workflows so employees spend less time fighting with digital tools and more time delivering a positive customer experience improves morale and customer satisfaction.
A good example of this is emerging AI technologies. Rather than simply providing AI tools and mandating that employees use them, track how people engage with AI and use that information to refine your training.
Another example of this is confusing SaaS tools. If you use Salesforce in your organization, you’ve probably noticed that it’s powerful, but confusing, especially for new team members. Having visibility into how people use tools like Salesforce, a core function of employee productivity analytics, can help you improve your training and streamline workflows in the platform.
Discover how Fullstory helped a Fortune 10 Insurance company improve its Salesforce workflows.
Challenge two: Tool juggling and workflow friction
SaaS sprawl means many companies have complex workflows that combine legacy tools, desktop applications, and SaaS platforms from multiple developers. If these tools don't seamlessly integrate, it can require multiple logins and time-consuming duplication of data entry.
According to a report from Ivanti, 57% of office workers say they feel stressed by the number of tools they use each day. Inefficient workflows can cause unnecessary errors, reduced productivity, and an increased risk of employee burnout.
Streamlining your technology stack can have numerous potential benefits:
Increased productivity
Increased customer satisfaction
Reduced error rates due to less duplication of work
Improved employee morale
Lower costs, as you're paying to manage fewer applications
Application rationalization helps remove bloat from your tech stack. In many organizations, unused or duplicate tools account for as much as one-third of the software spend. Removing those redundancies saves the company money while freeing employees to focus on delivering a better customer experience.
Challenge three: Onboarding in a fragmented environment
Have you ever recruited someone and felt frustrated at how long it takes to find the right person and then bring them up-to-speed? Around 66% of job hunters say that a streamlined and efficient recruiting process makes them more likely to accept a job offer.
In a complex or fragmented environment, ramp-up times can be much longer. This is particularly true when hiring remote workers since they'll need to complete their onboarding digitally.
A good DEX helps greatly with onboarding and producing confident, productive employees:
Employees are less likely to feel overwhelmed during their first few days
New starters can hit the ground running, being productive quickly
Remote workers can find everything they need with minimum handholding
Employee retention improves when people feel confident in their work
By tracking tool usage and collecting feedback from employees, you can identify areas where new hires struggle and use this information to adjust your onboarding process, which accelerates proficiency, helps reduce staff turnover, and provides customers with a better and more consistent experience.
Challenge four: SaaS waste and hidden costs
Overlapping apps cause duplicated effort. Forgotten renewals of unused tools can drain your software budget, and shadow IT can inflate costs, create security or business continuity issues, and lead to undocumented, further fragmented workflows.
Complex workflows confuse and frustrate employees, leaving IT teams with limited visibility and an inability to provide optimal support. The customer experience also suffers, as disconnected systems can lead to delays, lost requests, errors during hand-offs, and inconsistent customer service.
Managing SaaS spend offers more than cost savings:
Streamlined workflows save time
Improved customer service due to lower error rates
Better customer response times
Empower employees by giving them everything the need in one tool
One major food and beverage company found approximately $2 million in annual savings when it investigated its SaaS budget. Rationalizing their stack also helped reduce tool switching, resulting in better customer response times.
Why better DEX improves customer experience
The digital employee experience is one aspect of the overall employee experience, but it impacts all areas of their day-to-day work experience. When your employees aren't struggling with the stack they're working with, they'll be more confident, productive, engaged, and happier.
This has a ripple effect, as confident, engaged employees are better equipped and more likely to provide a high level of service. When an employee feels supported by their digital environment, they'll:
Provide more empathetic customer service
Be more productive
Be better equipped to solve complex problems
Make fewer mistakes
Be less likely to burn out
When you enhance the digital employee experience, you create an environment where employees can offer a smoother customer experience with fewer errors and better service. This builds trust in your brand and fosters long-term customer relationships.
Useful tools for improving your DEX
There are many useful tools to help companies of all sizes improve their DEX. Some tools to consider deploying within your organization include:
Fullstory Workforce focuses on the actual in-app behavior to identify and resolve workflow friction and improve software adoption.
1E: This endpoint management solution lets you monitor, troubleshoot and manage endpoints without having to resort to privacy-invading techniques such as screen sharing.
Nexthink: Monitor device health, application performance and network connectivity. Get real-time analytics and insights into the digital experience of your employees, whether they’re working from home or in the office. Nexthink even lets you collect employee feedback directly.
ControlUp: Using ControlUp, your IT support teams can find and fix problems with remote devices, and manage relatively difficult-to-troubleshoot issues such as high CPU usage or poor network performance.
Lakeside: See information about the health and performance of your employee’s devices. This AI-driven solution helps your IT team be more proactive by flagging up issues before your employees do, so they can push patches or fix them remotely.
Boost your digital employee experience
When you first start examining the digital employee experience in your organization, streamlining it can seem like an insurmountable task. However, every DEX challenge presents an opportunity to improve your business at several levels.
At Fullstory, we offer a variety of tools to analyse and improve the digital employee experience. Workforce gives you detailed insights into how your employees are using (or not using) the tools you’ve given them. Armed with this information, you can streamline your workflows, reduce unused licenses, save money and improve employee morale. To learn more about how we can help you boost your DEX, watch a product tour today.
