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Application Experience: Improve Employee Productivity with Smarter Monitoring

PUBLISHEDMay 26th, 2023

Lessons learned from over a million instrumentations

The explosive growth of web applications has created a serious blind spot for End User Computing (EUC) teams. While a few of the most business-critical custom web applications built by company DevOps teams are instrumented with Application Performance Management (APM) tools, the remaining commercial SaaS applications, whether customized/extended or “out-of-the-box” are a complete blind-spot. IT has no view to how (or even if) employees are adopting, using, and experiencing those applications.

This blind spot leads to more tickets, longer and more difficult troubleshooting efforts, and increased reactivity— significantly impacting employee experience and business productivity.

Application Experience has now surpassed well over a million instrumented employee browser endpoints — delivering rich telemetry to IT and End User Computing (EUC) teams proactively ensuring their employee Digital Employee Experience (DEX). This proactive visibility has yielded impressive business benefits, spanning the complete employee experience using web applications across commercial packaged SaaS, Customized SaaS, and custom web applications.

This blog will first explore three shared learnings that EUC teams need to consider when managing their application performance, and detail three specific customer examples of improving employee productivity by boosting Employee DEX when using web applications.

Learning 1: Web Applications are Business Critical and so is Productivity

Web applications are now the dominant class of applications in active employee use. Whether to support B2B, B2C, or basic daily employee productivity, the typical employee uses dozens of different web applications on a daily or weekly basis. If these apps are not performing, employees cannot get their job done. Application issues can have a domino effect impacting productivity –customers cannot be onboarded, revenue cannot be booked, or products cannot be shipped. For customer-facing or business-partner-facing applications, company reputation and brand may also be negatively affected.

Takeaway: Delivering Excellent Experience Mandates Monitoring Employee Application Experience

Employee experience using web applications – of all variants – must be continuously monitored. EUC teams must have the visibility to proactively optimize employee experience and improve productivity. The foundational “metric that matters” for employee experience using web applications is response time – how quickly does the application respond to employee actions.

Learning 2: Web Applications – Easy to Deploy but Hard to Proactively Manage DEX

The nature of web applications, especially SaaS and Customized SaaS applications, is a constant state of change. New capabilities and releases are often deployed weekly, if not more often. And every change, no matter how well tested by vendors or internal DevOps teams, has the potential to create performance or access issues for employees. No vendor (or company) can test every possible employer-employee configuration (e.g., Hardware, software compatibilities on their browsing device, connectivity issues, or conflicts with other employee uses). Unanticipated and sometimes highly employee-specific issues are inevitable. The result? A huge spike in issues and incident reports that are incredibly difficult to resolve.

While APM tools can quickly find issues with the performance of the application code and backend configuration during both development and operations, they are completely blind to individual total employee experience (they cannot know what is not measured).

Takeaway: Monitoring Applications is not Sufficient to Improve Employee Productivity

To truly improve employee productivity (and business productivity) all aspects of employee interaction with the complete IT environment must also be continuously monitored – from employee devices, configurations, and connectivity, through to employee adoption, interaction, and use of every application.

Learning 3: When Measured, Individual Employee Experience is Different!

Based on nearly two million browser endpoints instrumented by Nexthink Application Experience to-date, we and our customers have noticed that each employee’s experience with web application performance is vastly different. Even when the average response time of an employee-facing application appears acceptable, this typically hides an underlying reality. As seen above, while the average application response time (in this case Salesforce) is 4.7 seconds, with many employees having significantly better performance, the reality is there are also far too many experiences that are significantly slower, or even completely non-responsive (the red box highlighting frustrated employee experiences above). Good on average is far from good enough.

Takeaway: Small Improvements in Average Response Time Yield Large Benefits

Even relatively small improvements in application average response time will significantly improve the experience of large numbers of employees – reducing tickets for EUC and Application Teams, and significantly improving real-world employee productivity. Monitoring and proactively alerting EUC to employees having frustrating experience in their use of applications is key to EUC teams getting ahead of employee productivity-impacting issues.

Global Examples of Productivity Gains

Global Financial Services Company saves over 11,000 hours productivity

This large, multinational bank instrumented over 60 different web applications with Nexthink Application Experience, including both customized commercial SaaS applications and some internally developed web applications. Together, these applications represented over 3.5 million individual employee page-loads per month. Using Application Experience continuously, and in conjunction with APM tooling where applicable, they were able to reduce the average page load time by over 25% per application, saving on average 1-2 seconds each.

One second may not sound like a lot but remember two things: first, anytime something is done millions of times a month, the numbers will add up! Second, because of the “distribution effect” (shown visually above) shifting the average over a large population will dramatically improve the experience of many people – far beyond only 1 or 2 seconds.

The company calculated that they saved 11,667 hours in total, based on the conservative improvement of only 1 second, per page load, per employee, per application (12 months x 3.5 million page-loads/month divided by 3600 seconds in an hour. Note this calculation does not include the massive reduction in tickets and workload on their EUC and Application Teams.

European Insurance Company – boosts productivity, revenues, and brand

This company had a mission-critical Agent-facing application used by employees to work with customers to generate revenues. It was based on a highly customized CRM-like SaaS application designed for their unique business needs. An application upgrade created some significant issues. First was an increase in average response time to over 6 seconds for the application back-end alone! There were 4,500 employees using the application, with 550 per day on average, each using it on average 19 times a day – 10,450 uses per day.

With Nexthink Application Experience the internal application team and the CRM vendor could closely cooperate to rapidly find and resolve the issue, reducing the average page-load times by 50%, to under 3 seconds. The gains represented over 8 hours per day (3 seconds x 10,450 divided by 3,600 = 8.7 hours). Most critically, it ended the client-facing freezes and crashes altogether – improving revenues and brand image.

Global Consulting Services – high visibility productivity boost

This global boutique consulting services company had a highly customized Salesforce implementation for dedicated use by their Business Associates – extremely highly compensated employees under contract with the company’s customers. They had a six-month long problem spanning multiple geographies manifesting as terrible page loads with slow network speeds. The company had invested in high-end network management observability tooling but could not discern the actual root cause due to lack of total DEX visibility.

Nexthink Application Experience was brought in for evaluation to see if it would add value. Browsers were instrumented with Nexthink Application Experience web extension, and, in three separate two-hour sessions with Nexthink Consultants, they rapidly discovered the source of the problem: a specific, customized Salesforce plug-in (Split.io) and its interactions with the configuration of their broader environment. This led to immediate savings of over 150 hours per month for their 230+ Business Associates.

Seemingly Small Improvements Really Add Up When Optimizing Total Employee DEX

These three global companies each saw rapid and significant financial value from the use of Application Experience to complete their proactive DEX visibility. Whether direct productivity gains, reduction in outages and tickets, improving their brand image – or all three – these companies experienced what every Nexthink customer can achieve: complete digital workplace observability and automation to optimize productivity and cost in fast-changing IT landscapes.

Learn more directly from Nexthink Customers.

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