A bad digital experience disrupts my focus time
Fundamentally, to do my job I need to be able to focus. If I can’t focus, I can’t be productive. In the BC (Before covid) era, I used to get a lot of focus time when flying, driving, or commuting. My frustrations would rise, however, when my communication tools wouldn’t work. (Can you hear me?) When I had to connect to hotel, in-flight, or customer guest Wi-Fi. (Where is the page to put in the code?) When my device would blue screen if I plugged in a HDMI or lugubrious VGA dongle to project in a conference room.
Each of these frustrations would lead me to seek out new solutions or maybe, if I remembered, open an internal support ticket. A Business Moment would be lost due to faffing about.
In the past six months we have had an unprecedented 46 million people working from home. That’s 46 million people struggling to focus as a result of distractions that include family and childcare, shared space "offices" and unreliable network connections. Ironically, my BC digital issues like communication tools, home Wi-Fi, and home office connectivity to a second monitor persist universally.
The three wants of IT
Each of these distractions are not usually captured by enterprise IT as they are just normal headwinds. Indeed, enterprise IT organizations are generally extremely reactive and overwhelmed with monitoring what they care about. Focus is only brought to bear when a number of incidents are combined into a problem. How often do annoyances and frustrations rise to the level of individual action? How do we improve the digital experience of everyone, regardless of the creative solutions and shadow IT they have developed to ensure business continuity? How do I shift left instead of constantly slipping right?
The good news is that we have some idea of what IT wants their IT infrastructure to look like and do in order to deliver great digital experiences…
- I want to be proactive
Enterprise IT organizations want the ability to visually correlate multiple trends of performance, stability, sentiment, and responsiveness. They want to know right now every device driver that is not in a working state. They want to correlate driver stability and blue screens and target any device that is having an issue to update those drivers. They want to know if the problem is resolved after a week. Then they want their first contact with a business partner to be if they are happy that no more crashes occur when connecting to a second monitor.
- I want to be informed
They want to know at a glance when a location, group, or type of devices is not performing. They want to know if an issue is plaguing one device or many. They want to know what the business is doing—not what IT thinks it was doing. They want to know the responsiveness impact of the security agents on the device. They want to keep employees both secure and happy. Fundamentally, they want to provide timely and accurate feedback to improve everyone’s digital experiences.
- I want to be precise
If a business partner is raising an issue via a chatbot, ticket, or phone call, IT not only want to resolve their request but look beyond to improve their digital experience. They want the ServiceNow context to show, without having to swivel their chair, exactly how their device is performing and they don’t want an open-ended empty air question of "anything else I can help you with?" Let them go beyond right now. Let them go beyond each time, every time, everywhere.
As the Work From Anywhere Enterprise becomes a very real vision of the future, being able to understand what IT needs to service their clients better will alter how we measure and approach digital experience initiatives. It all boils down to one simple fact: digital experiences matter.
