Uncover How Your Employees Experience Their SaaS Applications in Real-Time
With employees depending on web applications every day, you can’t risk leaving anything to doubt when it comes to managing your IT estate. Although technology performance might appear “in the green” from IT’s perspective, how often are employees experiencing application outages or slowdowns you’re not aware of? Are they using that highly touted new app you rolled out – or avoiding it because of hidden usability problems? How many SaaS application licenses are going unused and wasting precious IT budget?
Introducing Nexthink Application Experience – extending application visibility with the industry’s leading DEX management platform
To address these challenges, we are excited to introduce Nexthink Application Experience, the newest addition to the Nexthink Experience platform. It extends Nexthink Experience with unprecedented application visibility from the employee perspective.
Real-time monitoring means you can proactively manage application health as experienced by employees. Incidents are resolved faster with guided troubleshooting and automated remediation – enabling many problems to be addressed before employees even experience them. You can also understand employee sentiment towards usability and performance. Combined with quantitative usage data, this qualitative feedback helps you see and solve the hidden usability issues employees face.
When application problems do occur, they can be notoriously difficult to troubleshoot – especially for SaaS apps. Is the problem with the app itself, the network, the device, the browser, or something else?
Consider the case of an ERP upgrade. The change is rolled out to a pilot region, but within one day, IT sees a decline in overall employee sentiment. Exploring the data in Nexthink Experience, the EUC team determines the decline is only seen among employees in the pilot region. Drilling down in Application Experience shows that immediately following the ERP upgrade, those employees began experiencing degraded performance with the application. Nexthink further shows that a specific application transaction is the culprit. Filtering on the transaction reveals that only pilot users with older Chrome versions are impacted, while all others are fine. The team determines there is a minimum version of Chrome needed for the ERP upgrade. They then conduct an Engage campaign to inform all ERP users with older Chrome versions that they will need to update Chrome, with a message offering to automatically perform the Chrome upgrade now or remind them in the future.
Application Experience also provides comprehensive usage and adoption information. In the example below, we see a Salesforce adoption dashboard showing extensive usage information. Immediately, end-user computing and other IT teams can spot trends in who is using the application and the volume of usage, both in the aggregate and by specific application page and transaction. Application Experience also makes it easy to drill down into the data and view usage by operating system, browser version, location, and many other dimensions. This gives IT an early warning system if usage starts trending in the wrong direction and helps you pinpoint which employees might be having issues. These same insights are now at your fingertips for any web or SaaS application.
Know how your web applications are being used
Real-time, employee-centric web application visibility
Nexthink has long provided comprehensive employee-centric visibility across your entire EUC estate. IT leaders rely on Nexthink to deliver a superior experience across Windows and macOS with desktop and browser apps, spanning physical, virtual and desktop-as-a-service environments. Nexthink Application Experience now extends SaaS and web application visibility to an exceptionally deep level, providing comprehensive insight into application pages and individual transactions.
But it’s not this application visibility on its own that has IT teams so excited. After all, applications are just one piece of the digital employee experience. And one of Nexthink’s core beliefs has always been that the only effective way to improve digital experience is to understand and manage it as a whole. It’s the unpredictable interplay between devices, apps, virtualization, infrastructure, and networks that creates the beautiful mess called “experience.” Only by monitoring and managing these with a single, correlated view can you hope to deliver a superior experience to your workforce.
By monitoring and managing all domains of employee-facing technology, organizations are achieving dramatic improvements in IT efficiency, employee satisfaction with IT, and technology rollout success. The additional visibility provided by Application Experience further amplifies these results – helping you accelerate problem resolution, reduce application licensing costs, and increase application adoption and value.
Complete visibility into web application performance from the employee perspective
Problems with web applications frequently only affect some employees, making it necessary for IT to explore resources beyond the application itself to identify the cause. As seen in the SAP S/4 HANA – SD example above, Application Experience delivers a real-time view of the performance of every key web page. Views can be categorized by filters like client type, location, browser version, device configuration and more – allowing fine-grained focus on employees with a shared issue.
In this example, we see that something happened to double the response time of key pages on February 12. The issue appears to be network related and impacts employees in only one location: Lausanne. Guided investigations (upper right) help rapidly focus troubleshooting on precise employee cohorts sharing performance, reliability or adoption problems. In this case, a new VPN client had been deployed for those employees without sufficient testing, causing significant slowdowns. Only by correlating activity and events across application, device, network and other factors can root causes like this be quickly identified. Then automated remediations can resolve the problem using Nexthink Engage and Act. And although this example is a SaaS application, the same capabilities apply equally to custom web applications.
Deep insight into SaaS and web application transaction performance
Employee experience with web applications is not limited to simply how fast web pages load. For example, a SharePoint page might load quickly, but if an employee’s interaction with the page involves actions or steps that are slow or broken (say, to save or download a document), the overall experience is poor. For this reason, we built Application Experience to deliver performance insights down to the transaction level – as part of a complete digital employee experience management solution – providing the SaaS visibility IT teams have long sought!
Real-time application transaction performance from the employee perspective
Critical business applications often have individual workflow steps with significant business value. Consider the use of an ERP application such as SAP S/4 HANA for procurement, shipping, or order processing (shown above). If specific transactions are unavailable due to errors, or are performing poorly, this can directly impact employee productivity and the business’s bottom line. With Application Experience, you have the visibility to see exactly what’s happening, where, which employees are affected, and how long the problem has been occurring.
Accelerate application adoption to increase ROI and reduce costs
To obtain maximum value from your applications, you want employees to extensively use those applications’ features. Application Experience delivers lifecycle insights into how employees are using web and SaaS applications, including which features they are using and how those features are performing. For SaaS applications, this deep insight allows you to close the gap between what is actually used and what is licensed. For custom web applications, it enables you to improve the features’ usability while the application is being built or piloted, to prevent issues or poor uptake later on. And, in production, it can be used to ensure that critical features are actually being adopted and used as planned.
Detailed, transaction-level usage visibility
In summary, we are thrilled to extend Nexthink Experience to continue delivering on our vision of improving the digital workplace and delighting employees. Only Nexthink provides the real-time analytics, employee sentiment, and automated remediation IT needs to continuously improve the digital employee experience. With Application Experience, IT’s ability to deliver a flawless experience with SaaS and web applications just got even brighter.
Please join our CMSwire webinar on April 29, 2021 to learn more about Unlocking the True Potential of SaaS Applications in Your Enterprise and how IT teams are solving some of their toughest problems with Application Experience.
Related posts:
- 5 Sustainable IT Practices for Your SaaS Applications
- 3 Big Reasons to Upgrade to Nexthink Experience
