I recently spoke to one of our Customers in Financial Services, who offer financial services through a network of Agents located across the United States. The agents are customer-facing and revenue generating. They rely on a variety of browser-based applications to deliver services to their clients – making these applications mission-critical.
This director of End User Computing services wanted to share a new “value journey” they are now realizing as they transformed to move to their agents to VDI.
Background and Initial Journey
He shared how they got Application Owners to embrace and adopt Nexthink Application Experience to continuously improve the quality and performance of the joint Agent-Customer experience. He reminded me they had started with their non-customized commercial SaaS web applications (e.g. Salesforce) and had recently reached a milestone of over 100 different applications instrumented and proactively managed to the direct benefit of their Agents (and customers).
[Application Experience for Salesforce Overview]
Latest Value – Planning for VDI
The next stage of their evolution focused on beginning their move to VDI for their agents, but the move to VDI could not come at the cost of their mission critical apps.
The most important application for them is MoneyGuide. This application provides the “platform” upon which most chargeable services are offered to customers.
The good news is Application Experience provides the same level of visibility in VDI. Specifically, they were able to rapidly isolate a recent issue with the MoneyGuide backend – and work quickly with the vendor to resolve it. This issue was informed by Nexthink benchmarks of MoneyGuide performance at other companies coupled with the detailed performance telemetry in Nexthink.
[Recent degradation in performance of the MoneyGuide backend]
The Application Owner is thrilled. The same instrumentation that delivered so many wins for their 100 web applications is now extended to their rapidly growing Virtualized Desktop world - eliminating a major potential obstacle to the successful rollout and adoption of the company’s strategic VDI initiative.
Summary
Across more than 100 applications, they enjoy a strategic management process whereby all applications are tracked and scored/compared across lines of business – an internal competition to continuously improve. As they say, “No Application Owner wants to be the one in the red this month!” Agent productivity is up across the board, and tickets and complaints are down.
VDI Experience continuously monitors all aspects of virtual desktop experience in real-time, delivering clarity into every VDI session and employee interaction. It enables IT teams to stay one step ahead of building issues affecting employee use of virtualized desktops.
Application Experience gives them the ability to understand every aspect of their agents' experience with MoneyGuide and all their other applications – their performance, reliability, how they are being subjectively experienced, and how this compares with other companies – for all desktop environments, VDI or not.
Nexthink eliminates the time-consuming, expensive and wasteful practice of automatically escalating reported issues to valuable and expensive VDI teams who are blamed for everything, including application issues. The result:
- Workplace and Service Desk teams have the visibility they need to accurately and quickly determine precisely where to escalate application issues.
- Application Teams have the context they need to dig in and solve actual application issues quickly, confident in the knowledge it isn’t client, desktop, or network related.
- VDI teams get fewer, and more accurately escalated issues impacting virtual users and their web applications.
This ensures the best possible issue triage so that non-VDI issues aren’t wastefully escalated to VDI because “we don’t know, and they are virtual… so it must be on them”
Learn more about VDI Experience and Application Experience