If you want to increase the likelihood that employees feel valued by your organization, passionate about their jobs, and productive at work, it’s time to evaluate their technology. Study after study has shown the link between the quality and performance of digital resources and employee satisfaction. In fact, over 50% of organizations that report high employee engagement and productivity levels also report notable improvements in employee experience within the past two years, according to research from the Economist Intelligence Unit.
But here’s the catch—in order to invest in improving digital employee experience, you must first answer the dreaded question: what is the ROI? This is especially difficult for IT, as many teams have no clear way of measuring how improving end-user experience could save the organization time and money.
The Economist survey confirms this assumption. Just 27% of low-performing organizations strongly agreed that their IT department has the authority to design and select systems to optimize employee experience, compared with 68% of high performers.
To help teams achieve decision maker buy-in, Lakeside Software has created a tool to calculate the ROI of digital experience monitoring. By monitoring the usage and performance of endpoint devices, organizations can take a data-backed approach to understanding holistic employee experience. Once measured, experience can be optimized and improved. If you’re curious about the return that improving end-user experience could have for your organization, try the ROI calculator today and see for yourself.
Calculating the ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring
When creating the calculator, we considered three common use cases for digital experience monitoring: service desk improvements, asset optimizations, and productivity enhancements. These areas tend to be the most impactful for upgrading employees’ digital experience and can produce a strong ROI depending on the composition of the environment. The calculator accounts for different variables to refine the results such as whether IT support is outsourced and the extent that VDI is used in the enterprise.
Service Desk Improvements
This is perhaps the most obvious benefit to using a digital experience monitoring solution. When I talk about service desk improvements, I’m referring to the efficiencies that are achieved from having better visibility into the end-user computing estate. The best way to think about the role digital experience monitoring tools can have within your service organization is the following:
- Reactive support: A digital experience monitoring tool can alert IT to issues that are already happening in the environment. At that point, the solution can act as a system of record to pinpoint the root cause of any give issue. Additionally, the tool can specify how many users are being impacted by an issue so that IT can tackle widespread problems first.Factors contributing to the ROI of reactive support include mean time to resolution (MTTR), number of hours (or wages) lost due to productivity impacts caused by IT issues, and IT support costs.
- Proactive support: Digital experience monitoring solutions that monitor and alert on specific conditions or behavior enable IT teams to get ahead of potential problems. For example, if the tool identifies that a certain cluster of endpoints are seeing a consistent uptick in their CPU usage, it can alert IT of the potential productivity-impacting issue or perhaps even take an auto-remediating action without involving IT. In that way, an issue that was brewing is stopped before it presents itself as an issue users notice.Factors contributing to the ROI of proactive support include number of hours (or wages) lost due to productivity impacts caused by IT issues, ticket volumes, and IT support costs.
- Predictive support: Digital experience monitoring solutions are now starting to incorporate AIOps capabilities which presents an opportunity for IT teams to provide users with predictive support. To do this, the tool can leverage AI to monitor and find patterns in the environment, thereby preventing potential issues from surfacing. Say, for instance, a user is experiencing network issues; a digital experience monitoring tool that leverages AIOps can help identify other users that may have that issue in the future given similar conditions.Factors contributing to the ROI of predictive support include ticket volumes, IT support costs, L1 support staffing needs, and number of hours (or wages) lost due to productivity impacts caused by IT issues.
Asset Optimizations
Organizations commonly accumulate significant amounts of software/software licenses, hardware, and services that are no longer being used or performing optimally. Areas a digital experience monitoring solution can shed light on include the following:
- Overprovisioned software or hardware
- Licenses your users are no longer using or that they never used
- Licenses that are underused and could be downgraded (such as replacing Office 365 E5 with E3 licenses)
- Hardware that needs to be refreshed or enhanced to meet current business needs
- VDI resources that were under or overprovisioned
- Unused hardware existing in your environment
IT costs can be greatly reduced once visibility is improved into which resources and services are needed, and which are not. Often, we find that there is overprovisioned technology in enterprise IT environments that could represents savings in the millions in some instances.
Productivity Enhancements
One of the biggest value props of a good digital experience monitoring solution is the ability to measure something that is traditionally unmeasurable: end-user experience (EUX). Lakeside’s digital experience monitoring platform, SysTrack, provides an EUX score for each user and group in the environment as well as the environment as a whole. The higher the EUX score, the less productive time an employee is losing due to IT issues.
For the purpose of our ROI calculations, productivity enhancements refer to the number of hours that are saved from being wasted due to IT issues. Think downtime: what is the cost to your organization of having 30 minutes of downtime across 20% of your estate? The response to that may vary according to your industry, the nature of work those specific users do, the time of day, and other factors. Our calculator accounts for these discrepancies and allows you to tailor values to provide the most accurate outcome possible for your environment.
Ready to see what the ROI of digital experience monitoring is for your organization? Click the button below to get started.
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