A blog on assessing employees’ technology experiences
In ICSC, we have been thinking about the concept of experience economy.
Worker loyalty is the currency of the experience economy, making the protection of the employee experience essential. Neglecting this may result in companies losing the “war for talent” and becoming vulnerable to the “great resignation.
To prevent such negative outcomes, companies need to become design-led organizations. This means understanding how employees feel about the technology they use is crucial for maintaining a strong business and brand.
Given that a company’s biggest investment will go into staffing, IT must have the ability to diligently support that workforce and recognize when productivity is at risk. Providing an amazing workplace experience helps to attract the best people to your organization – and keep them there. It must be standard practice that day-to-day IT operations deliver services efficiently, with quality and with consistency, and that the IT organization accumulates knowledge of future employee service demands.
Critically, optimizing the employee experience will impact your customers’ experience. The first rung of the ladder you’ll climb to build a strong customer experience is providing the IT support needed to have an energized and productive workforce.
Organizations must realize that sustainable success is inseparable from the experience of their workforce, and that empathy must be a corporate concern. Utilizing experience analytics and reporting metrics provides a means to achieving sustainable success.
Launching the Transformation Journey
Until recently, there hasn’t been an objective way of defining what a good employee experience is, though there certainly is a way of defining a poor one. A CTO who notices that unapproved applications are popping up everywhere should be concerned about shadow IT and the risks that creates across the IT estate. In the experience economy, where employees are consumers of a brand of workplace experience, the dilution of that brand causes shadow IT.
To avoid brand dilution and empower an organization to positively and successfully take part in the experience economy, it necessitates having an efficient and repeatable way to discover what employees feel and think about their IT services.
In collaboration with the partner team at Qualtrics, ICSC has integrated our Modern Workplace solutions with its Experience Management platform (XMos), to create hybrid insights into employees’ circumstances through experience, operational and technical sources. ICSC’s innovative Experience Cube methodology harnesses this data to create a three-dimensional view of the employee’s workplace experience – without significant manual effort in collection and analysis.
By regularly providing objective, averaged metrics for the employee’s level of satisfaction across the technology experience, the methodology enables IT organizations to gain insight, resolve issues or create new needed services, evidenced by clear and measurable demand signals.
This is key to ICSC’s ultimate goal of getting customers to the position where their workforce will consistently experience the best possible service landscape – that is, where everything just works, each time.
Committing to experience
To further this goal, ICSC is leveraging Qualtrics’ technology to generate insights for employee experiences across workplace journeys in real time. A typical employee’s journey starts with a goal – a task they need to do or an issue they need to fix – that will take them through multiple functions across multiple systems and channels. For IT today, managing that journey can be a logistical challenge for technology services, and too often employees become frustrated with the inability to smoothly reach a resolution. You can see how that may lead them to become a proponent of shadow IT.
Within a journey managed by ICSC, user feedback is collected at various points, using advanced analytics to observe and process how workers express their sentiments and perception as the journey progresses. IT can intercede to help users at the point where they become dissatisfied with the experience. Interventions could range from popping up the information they need to move on, to dispatching a service agent to their place of work.
Having a deep understanding of employees’ needs and preferences puts IT in an excellent position to finely control journey mapping. Here we are using Qualtrics Experience iD feature to build user experience profiles and automatically route employees on the journey that should have the least friction for them.
The ability for IT to service employees in this way is even more critical now that so many people work remotely or in hybrid conditions. In today’s workplace, you need a strategy and toolsets to understand what is happening at the “point of consumption” of the service, wherever the employee sits.
Guiding the experience management lifecycle
The experience economy is very real, with major implications for how well people perform in the workplace. ICSC began its transformation into an experienced company two years ago, with the goal of delivering a personalized and modern workplace experience that empowers employees to connect, collaborate and work seamlessly and securely on any device, anytime and anywhere.
Nowadays, we work as a company that helps our Modern Workplace customers improve their employees’ experience. We offer services to manage devices, give digital support, and enable smart collaboration. We also have a team of experienced managers who guide customers through the process of understanding their workforce and analyzing how they feel. Our focus is to keep making the workplace experience better for employees, so their company can succeed in the experience economy.