Experience Central

Strategic Digital Employee Experience Management

With Nexthink Workplace Experience (built on the Nexthink Infinity platform) we introduced a next-generation DEX score (V3) along with an all-new product – Nexthink Experience Central – to deliver the strategic guidance Senior IT Leaders require to successfully enable and advance their company’s DEX strategy.

In our discussions and research, we found that IT leaders (and their teams) are being increasingly pressured by senior leadership to build and implement a comprehensive DEX strategy. And, further, Gartner has noted: “By 2025, 50% of IT organizations will have established a DEX strategy, team, and management tool, up from 15% in 2022”. 

We at Nexthink have been heartened at the public and analyst reception our DEX leadership and strategy have achieved since our launch of Experience Central and the new DEX Score in 2023, but we’ve not been resting on our laurels as DEX leaders. Now, in 2024 we’ve significantly enhanced this strategic focus within Experience Central across several areas:

• Extended DEX Score is more complete and closer to employee subjective experience
• Experience Central: Sentiment now equal billing with technology metrics
• Experience Central: Enhanced focus, guidance and reporting

1.    The DEX Foundation: All the “Metrics that Matter”

Previously, with Nexthink Experience and the DEX V2 score, customers have taken advantage of the power of the device-centric DEX score to implement “shift left” proactive processes. It enabled proactive discovery of experience-impacting issues with multiple types of metric dimensions having potential negative impacts on employee experience. This included CPU, Memory, application versions, boot durations, crash frequencies, and a host of others. But, as powerful and revolutionary as this was, Nexthink passionately wanted to take it to the next level. Why? Because it was a score that was a proxy for the actual, real, user experience. Yes, those technology metrics may impact employee experience, but there are so many more that we couldn’t include and deliver to customers using Nexthink Experience and DEX Score V2.

Remember Money Ball?

Just as the concept of “metrics that matter” revolutionized the strategic management of global sports teams about 15 years ago by changing the metrics leadership traditionally used to strategically manage their teams – with winning results - we’ve now expanded the concept of DEX score to include vastly more dimensions of the employee total user-experience. An employee’s experience is a combination of their full timeline experience across all the various aspects of IT resources they use: their devices, their locality (Office, Remote, in -transit, etc.), the performance of all the applications they use, their connectivity methods, and the smoothness of their collaboration sessions, as well as including subjective employee sentiment. Yes, device-related metrics remain a key element, but with the power of the all-new Nexthink Infinity platform and DEX Scores V3, we could cover them all.

This all-new DEX Score extends Endpoint-centric metrics to now include hard, specific metrics about the performance of additional IT technologies used by employees. These additional metrics include:

• The applications they use and their experienced performance, whether desktop client apps, or web-based; all the detailed performance and reliability information from Nexthink Application Experience is now factored.
• Their experiencing when using Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, how good is their call quality, sessions within broader calls, and experience in Meeting Rooms; all the detailed performance and reliability information from Nexthink Collaboration Experience is now factored.

And it now integrates previously separate “softer” metrics like Sentiment, collected from sources like Nexthink Employee Engagement campaigns. 

Moments of Experience – it’s ALL about the Users' Experience

It gets better. Our product team has implemented a patent-pending capability we call “Moments of Experience” – the ability to more closely follow each employee’s journey using all the different types of technologies that underpin the totality of their experience across their entire workday, including things like across device/type changes, where they are located, and
how they access IT resources.

Now IT Leaders and teams truly have access to the “metric that matters” – true, comprehensive, accurate, and precise employee-centric DEX scores – over time and for every employee.

Read our new "Sentiment and Technology for IT Leaders" whitepaper to learn more about the revolutionary new DEX score and our patent-pending "Moments of Experience".

2.    Extending the Strategic Cockpit – Experience Central

With the comprehensive, new DEX score, we could now deliver on our vision of giving IT leaders a strategic cockpit; one place where they can continuously visualize the total state of their DEX landscape: across all their employees and all their technologies. Where leaders can easily:

• Have a complete understanding of employee sentiment and how it relates to all relevant underlying IT technologies. 
• Find areas where employee experience is good, to determine why, and replicate the underlying practices and methods organization-wide.
• Find the area's most needing improvement to boost employee productivity (and IT reputation)
• Proactively identify beginning trends negatively impacting experience scores BEFORE employees even open tickets, so the issues can be assigned to the right teams and resolved proactively.
• Gain strategic insights across the totality of employee experience. We’ve added a top-level DEX score over-time display to see the history of technical score contributions and sentiment, as seen here:

Now, a simple glance can inform senior leaders as to those areas that are most broadly affecting scores, whether in a positive or negative direction. Here, for example, it is clear that the biggest negative impact on experience is related to Device Performance, where it is degrading our overall DEX score by 22 points.

3.    Guidance Clarification

To better and more clearly position the underlying scores in terms of providing strategic guidance, we have enhanced the User Interface and explanations, as seen here:

And… More is coming

Coming soon in Nexthink Infinity releases 2024.5 and 2024.6 you can expect to see an ever-growing set of additional Experience Central dashboards, including advanced insights and diagnostics.