At Cox Enterprises, employee experience has a direct connection to productivity. Technology errors, hiccups, and poor performance aren’t just frustrating, they can cause employees to disengage from their top priority work, slowing down crucial business projects.
These problems impact employee satisfaction, retention, and turnover, creating reputational and financial risks that can hinder long-term success. A privately held global conglomerate with over 50,000 employees globally and $23 billion in annual revenue, Cox Enterprises needs employees to operate efficiently so they can serve their customers via their subsidiaries: Cox Communications, Cox Automotive and Cox Farms.
For the digital workplace team at COX Enterprises, optimizing employee productivity comes from optimizing employee technology. And one of the most common types of technology used by employees today is applications. This means partnering with application teams to find opportunities to enhance employee productivity with experience data.
Read on to discover how Cox Enterprises enhances the employee experience to foster a productive workforce while ensuring sustainable, long-term growth for both its employees and the wider business.
The Problem
Although their application teams had robust management tools, the workplace team was aware that these monitoring tools had blind spots, preventing application owners from pinpointing the root cause of certain issues. On top of this, there were instances where issues were not visible in the monitoring tools at all. For instance, their management tools might say that ‘the app is up and running’ while employees continued to submit tickets, causing confusion and difficulty in accurately assessing application performance.
The workplace team brought in Nexthink to bridge the gap, but needed to gain buy-in from application teams and leadership before Nexthink data would be adopted and trusted by these teams. To do this, they focused on forge strong partnerships with these teams by asking and listening. What did these teams want to understand? What mattered to them?
Through this process, the team identified many opportunities to collaborate including on the intranet overhaul, and on issues stemming from a room booking application.
For the intranet overhaul, the teams made the decision to work together from the beginning, to see how experience data could enhance the rollout of the new platform. While the room booking application project stemmed from Nexthink itself, where the team saw otherwise unreported issues in the experience data and brought it to the application team.
The Approach: Give Us 30 Minutes and We’ll Give You a Dashboard
Gaining buy-in from application owners would be crucial to improving employee efficiency. To achieve this, the team focused on building trust and forging collaborative relationships with the application teams by offering. By utilizing the dashboards created by Nexthink, the team could easily demonstrate the efficiency of the platform, promising “give us 30 minutes and we’ll givesolutions. Nexthink Application Experience gives teams the opportunity to configure custom dashboards to monitor individual application performance. At COX Enterprises, the digital workplace team met with application teams with a promise: “give us 30 minutes and we’ll give you a dashboard”.
Their process was simple: ask and listen. Ask application teams what kinds of challenges they were having and listen to their needs. Then showcase how Nexthink data could help fill those gaps by building out customized dashboards to meet their needs.
For the intranet site, the digital workplace team collaborated closely with the application team from the outset, setting up a strategy to QA not only backend metrics, but frontend experience before the site launch. By utilizing the custom build Nexthink dashboard for proactive monitoring in the testing stage, the team identified broken links missed by standard application monitoring tools.
Similarly, it was the custom dashboard monitoring the room booking tool which first alerted the digital workplace team to an otherwise hidden trend: application lag on days with higher foot traffic in the office. Before bringing this issue to the application owner, the digital workplace team first looked in Nexthink for possible solutions to the issue to bring as well. Raising an issue and resolving it in the same moment.
The Impact
After fixing the identified issues and successfully launching the Intranet site, the team compared the last 30 days of the old platform to the first 30 days of the new platform. The comparison showed the key areas of success, such as pages now loading faster with fewer errors, resulting in an improved user experience for Intranet users.
For the room booking application, the team utilized the data provided to draw comparisons across specific days and highlighted the trend showing slow application response for hundreds of users on busy office days. Application Experience provided Cox with the hard data to make a business case to the vendor for app improvement.
The data provided by Nexthink has allowed Cox to address silent sufferers to ensure a smoother user experience for all employees throughout their workday.
Conserving and Enhancing the Employee (and Customer) Experience
By establishing a proactive IT environment, the team now emphasize continuous communication with application owners to preserve and enhance the digital experience of their employees. Instead of fighting against the current of incoming employee tickets, the digital workplace team can instead focus on a strategy they call “conserve and enhance” to maintain and continuously improve their digital employee experience.
Though a focus on application performance may at first glance seem like a mere technical enhancement, these small enhancements lead to increased uptime for employees, who can then, in turn, provide better service to business customers. From the keyboard to the customer, the experience is enhanced overall.
To learn more about Cox Enterprises’ journey with Application Experience and digital workplace management, watch their recent webinar ‘How to Optimize Employee Productivity with Cox Enterprises’.
