How to Evaluate Your Digital Experience Platform

5 key features to look for when comparing digital experience management (DEM) solutions for your organization

Digital experience management solutions are versatile, providing different use cases to better meet your company’s pain points, whether they are help desk efficiency, software utilization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) migration, or employee engagement.

These tools are able to improve IT service delivery and eliminate productivity roadblocks because they track, measure, and optimize the ways in which users interact with workplace technology. For 90% of surveyed C-level executives in Lakeside Software’s Future of Digital Workplaces survey, better digital experience is an important priority post-pandemic.

When choosing the right tool, however, organizations need to fully assess the features that each platform offers. For example, the latest Forrester New WaveTM report evaluating end-user experience management (EUEM) vendors against 10 criteria noted that “Today’s leaders increasingly deliver sentiment analysis of qualitative feedback, improved root-cause analysis, and remediation directly in-product.”

Critical questions to consider when comparing solutions include:

• Does it offer detailed digital experience monitoring data for clear visibility across the digital environment?
• Does it use surveys to better understand user sentiment?
• Does it work along with other IT service management (ITSM) tools such as ServiceNow?
• Does it have automated remediation features such as self-healing and mass-healing?
• Does it perform automated root cause analysis (RCA) for a faster mean time to resolve (MTTR)?

To help navigate this market, here are five key components to look for in a digital experience management platform.

 

1. Comprehensive Endpoint Data Collection

Digital experience management (DEM) starts with full visibility into the entire IT environment. This requires organizations to capture a high amount of quantitative and qualitative data at the edge. DEM solutions deploy an agent directly to the endpoint to gather real-time, objective data from telemetry metrics, such as CPU and memory usage.

For a full picture of the digital experience, it’s also necessary to understand user sentiment. Surveys — either prebuilt or customized — enable the IT staff to receive subjective employee feedback as well.

 

2. Intelligent Automation with AIOps

Gathering a large amount of experience data is not enough to improve end-user experience if the platform cannot sort through all that information to provide actionable insights. Machine learning enables IT technicians sort through the noise to pinpoint the most relevant data and understand what to prioritize to optimize the IT environment.

Enter AIOps, which stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations. In this age of big data, the demand for AIOps is on the rise. The reason is that these solutions aggregate, analyze, and contextualize massive amounts of data from multiple sources, not only to deliver meaningful insights but also to automate processes and tasks.

One of the uses of AIOps is to correlate events to find patterns, enabling faster identification of the root cause of problems and incident prediction. With smart sensors and pre-built scripts, it’s possible to trigger alerts or automate responses if certain thresholds are reached. For example, if the Wi-Fi signal drops to 80%, the IT team could be notified.

With intelligent automation, organizations can make their IT operations more proactive and improve employee productivity because:

• With faster incident resolution, employees can go back to work more quickly. This has a positive impact on ITSM metrics such as MTTR and ticket escalation.
• Proactive remediation reduces support ticket volume and downtime because IT issues are solved before users notice them.

 

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3. Broad Range of Integrations with Existing Tech Stacks

Organizations often rely on a range of IT solutions from different vendors, adding complexity to their digital environments. Digital experience management can give insights into what workplace technologies employees indeed use. In addition, the ability to extend these insights or incorporate performance data from other tools is critical to help companies simplify workflows and maximize the value of their IT investments.

By integrating with popular technologies, DEM platforms can help enterprises optimize IT resources based on business needs. Organizations using Lakeside for ServiceNow augmentation, for example, have benefited from an 18% drop in IT support tickets opened. That’s why the choice for a DEM product should also consider what third-party integrations are available out-of-the-box. For scalability, too, it’s important to deploy a platform that works with physical and virtual desktops, laptops, thin clients, and mobile devices, in addition to all major operating systems.

Offering support for cloud technologies is a must, too. Trends of digital transformation and remote work have increased the demand for cloud computing. Cloud infrastructure spending increased 12.5% year over year in the first quarter of 2021, according to IDC. These new developments have also accentuated the need for deep visibility into the cloud and remote environments.

 

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4. Different Use Cases for Faster ROI

Digital experience management solutions have expanded their capabilities, offering more use cases to help organizations achieve their return on investment (ROI). This means deploying DEM tools to align IT metrics to business key performance indicators (KPIs), especially when it comes to controlling IT costs and creating experience level agreements (XLAs).

According to Lakeside’s latest research, C-level executives believe that improvements to digital employee experience could reduce costs by 18.1% and increase revenues by 12.1%. Here are some common use cases that help to improve digital employee experience and save operational costs:

• IT optimization. DEM technologies empower the IT team to make data-driven decisions about license right-sizing, hardware procurement, and readiness for VDI migrations.
• IT efficiency. Faster resolution and fewer service desk tickets can increase employee productivity and satisfaction with IT service delivery.

 

5. End-User Experience Index

To better illuminate the impact of digital experience on user productivity, digital experience management platforms can combine qualitative feedback from surveys with quantitative telemetry metrics to create a user experience score.

A digital experience index can be used as a business KPI to ensure that employees are having a positive interaction with workplace technology. This feature is beneficial not only to optimize productivity but also to evaluate the impact of IT actions.

 

What Sets Lakeside Apart from the Competition

Powered by the SysTrack engine, Lakeside Software’s Digital Experience Cloud delivers the deepest visibility into user experience because it captures data from more than 10,000 points every 15 seconds. That’s 10 times more than any competitor.

Our cloud-based platform uses artificial intelligence to analyze all the experience data, offer actionable insights to overcome productivity hurdles, and even self-heal your IT environment if certain conditions are met. Lakeside also has extensive out-of-box integrations and provides free assessments to help organizations plan their next IT purchases.

 

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