Employees working on company devices may have negative, friction-full digital experiences that are not highlighted by traditional monitoring systems. E.g., they can experience slow Windows bootup times, applications that are starting up slowly or crashing, bad internet connectivity resulting in slow network download speeds, or applications like PowerPoint hanging when trying to save something. These issues generate friction for the employee using the devices, and result in frustration and lower employee engagement. This can create a wider issue for organizations re: depleting productivity, higher security risks, and loss of top talents or a company’s reputation.

What can IT departments do to avoid digital friction?

The challenge for IT departments today  is going beyond monitoring system data points to measure the real user experience received by the employee instead. IT needs to be able to gauge the user’s sentiment, or in other words what their unique perspectives on their digital experience. The only way this can be done is by asking them directly. The IT department would need an ingenious way to ask the employee specific questions related to a specific activity or an event, to then correlate that information with other data points to create actionable results.

There are a few areas IT departments should focus on:

  1. General or targeted surveys to check the perceived state of employee digital experience. The most generic ones can uncover if employees are satisfied with their device performance, giving a very high-level insight as a starting point. It can, of course, be more targeted by asking specific questions on certain applications or utilities that are being used, for example, ‘is MS Teams is working seamlessly or are you experiencing any VPN problems?’
  2. IT can also get valuable feedback by engaging the employee immediately after IT has delivered a service to see if their experience was positive and if this has resolved any issues. This will give valuable insights to the IT department as to whether they need to change anything in their service delivery.
  3. Engaging employees in the change process. Before a change is rolled out employees can be engaged to make sure they have done necessary preparation to successfully roll out the change. After the change has been done, IT can gather valuable feedback on user’s experience of the process and adjust it moving forward.

Sure, that sounds all great but how do we actually do it?

It might seem daunting for IT to need to adopt this new employee experience-centric focused approach so as to reduce digital friction. But with Tachyon Sentiment, gaining valuable insight and actionable data based on your user's digital experience couldn't be easier.
Sentiment allows the IT department to interact with individual employees by asking them questions. These questions can be in the form of surveys with multiple choice answers or free text answers and can be sent as general surveys to everyone in the organization or to a targeted group or individual users. Your employees will receive the survey via a system tray popup that they can choose to answer straight away or later. Sentiment is sensitive to when these surveys should popup For example, no surveys will be shown right after start up, or if the user is engaged in an activity such as a meeting. Also, the frequency and timing of the surveys are limited so as to not overload or disturb the employee in their work.

 

I've got the sentiment data, now what?

Once IT has answers coming back from users and employees about their experience, it can be confusing to know what to do with them. It is here that the integration of Sentiment in the Tachyon Experience product provides invaluable advantages. The results of surveys can be correlated with the other system data points  collected by Experience and a holistic picture of employee's digital work environment can be established.
Let’s look at an example here. A survey is sent out to all employees to find out how their experience with MS Teams has been. A couple of employees respond that their experience has been bad. So, let’s take a closer look at the feedback from one employee. We'll call him Peter.
Based on Peter’s feedback that he has problems with MS Teams the IT department can now have a closer look at his computer via Tachyon Experience. In an initial view, everything seems okay: his computer is running stable, the performance of CPU, disk, and network seem adequate, and he didn’t have any crashes of the MS Teams app.  But, a closer look at Peter’s network connection reveals he is working from home and connected to a personal WIFI. The WIFI in general seems okay but he has very strange DNS server’s setup. So, let us give Peter a call to find out what’s going on. After a short conversation it turns out Peter used to live in another country and manually changed the DNS server on his router. He took the router with him and set it up in his new home but forgot that he changed the DNS servers. After re-setting the DNS server to more local ones, his home network connectivity improves dramatically and he has no more issues accessing MS Teams.
This fix for Peter’s situation was only possible because the IT department got personal feedback from him re: MS Teams connectivity. Just looking at the system data, all seemed fine with his system. It also helped Peter to reduce the frustration and digital friction he was experiencing when he couldn’t talk to colleagues and join meetings. Now, his employee engagement is restored, and he is much happier.
Tachyon Sentiment helps to gauge the real user sentiments in an organization and intelligently combine that information with system data points, enabling IT department to fix issues and improve the digital employee experience.

Keen to learn more about Tachyon Sentiment? Why not check out the first blog in this series that provides an overview and explores prioritizing the employee digital experience! Alternatively, to talk to us about the benefits of Tachyon Sentiment get in touch today!