There’s a lot of guesswork in Corporate IT, probably more than most would admit. Even with the most advanced cutting-edge Endpoint Management tools at your disposal, you’ll still have to make decisions sometimes without knowing 100% of the outcomes.
But there’s a big difference between reaching-in-the-dark guesswork, versus educated-guesswork. My team has been able to improve upon the latter by accessing powerful Digital Employee Experience metrics and techniques.
And this has resulted in an important cultural change in the way we work.
We used to ask:
What’s wrong with the device?
Now we ask:
What can we do right for the user?
So how did we make this shift? Here are two real life examples:
L1 Checklists Powered w/ Smart End-User Experience Scoring
IT has always operated under the same sequence of events: a device underperforms, the employee raises a ticket, L1 support investigates, and hopefully (but not always) they fix the problem. And if they can’t fix the problem, it’s then passed up the chain, and the cost and anxiety and resources required to find a solution pile up.
I’ve always sympathized with my L1 team because they’ve had to face end-user problems with limited information. We decided to address that problem by adding experience scoring into the L1 checklist and tagging that information to certain actions.
This capability enabled us to get very creative in how we pool certain data from our L1 and L2 teams and it helped uproot small, annoying manual actions.
For example, in the past whenever we had to make a hardware refresh we used to study our endpoint management inventory. If a device was underperforming we’d manually investigate that one computer. The task itself maybe took two minutes, but when it’s multiple times a day, it adds up.
Our solution:
We added experience scoring data related to hardware performance into our L1 checklists and that helped our agents identify more inconsistencies and potential fixes upfront. Now my team can see when a device was shipped, when it should be replaced, and map those metrics to how the device is actually performing and whether the employee is satisfied or not. Ultimately, we were able to make smarter decisions and extend the lifecycle for our hardware because of this capability.
Here’s another example:
Internet Explorer to Edge – Solving a Big User Experience Problem
Another misnomer about IT is that all ideas have to be innovative and grandiose. But sometimes a simple idea and the right tool can trigger a net positive for employees.
We used to run a legacy production site in Internet Explorer that wouldn’t work in Chrome. We had to let users know we were transitioning to Edge, but contacting them via email wasn’t always successful.
We asked users with our direct-to-device DEX messaging tool to reply with the URLs they needed, and the response was very positive. We then added the URLs they shared with us to the Edge IE mode compatibility list, making the transition to Edge seamless.
And then something incredible happened. Employees started engaging with us via our DEX tool and we were able to educate them on the transition and create a better dialogue, something we would’ve never been able to do with email.
Conclusion
Guesswork is still part of the job, but thankfully my team has improved its approach to problem solving by taking full advantage of DEX-led solutions and thinking.
