In life, if you cut, you heal.
A minor nick might take a few days; a bigger gash, a few weeks.
But to self-heal in business, you need more than just a sticking plaster.
Un-checked performance failures can lead to poor sentiment. And that can cause a fatal infection.
That’s why you need to know if a malfunction or a bottle-neck or a weakness is festering somewhere in your IT eco system.
Because only then can you prescribe a remedy.
Analytics, service assurance, performance management, insight: these are the essential tools to help detect, diagnose and fix any issues which might negatively impact your user experience.
And that makes them just as important as the rest of your tech stack, maybe even more so.
“Historically, organisations have run their collaboration systems within their own, controllable environment; like a walled garden,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at global digital workplace management software provider VOSS, which is ahead of the game in this area.
“They had good visibility across their network; they could see how their systems were running and had tools to help them manage performance.
“However, service delivery is now increasingly cloud-based, with employees often working from home or customer sites or other remote locations. That means many organisations’ IT eco systems are more open and not fully-owned and controlled in the way they used to be.
“Employees are connected to their own broadband, they are using their own hardware and are sometimes deploying their own ways of working which do not fully align with organisational best practice.
“That means elements of service delivery can begin to falter or fail and reputations for poor service delivery can begin to develop. That kind of sentiment can spread rapidly and can be extremely harmful and disruptive”
Jalland describes it as an ‘impact spiral’ – the opposite to an ‘upward spiral’ which occurs when service delivery is rated highly.
The latter is a state which reflects well on organisations’ IT departments and which, in turn, creates a strong business case for increased technological investment. Ergo: yet better service delivery; yet better user experience; yet better bottom line.
“With hybrid working here to stay, it’s more important than ever to stay in tune with employee experience,” says Richard Ablitt, VOSS Insights Product Manager.
“Now that the workforce is dispersed – often spanning cities, countries and even continents – we need real-time insight into the performance of the collaboration and productivity tools that employees use, to be able to react really quickly when anything goes awry.
“Often, when a systems administrator is notified that a problem has occurred, such as a threshold having been reached, or a service having failed and a service desk getting calls from multiple users, it’s too late.
“Even if the problem is immediately fixed, employee experience has been suboptimal and satisfaction rates have gone down. The damage has been done.
“In the hybrid workplace especially, sentiment analysis becomes incredibly important. If we are able to proactively measure and analyze employee sentiment, we can respond to situations before they become issues.
“Look at it a different way: as a user, how often do you submit a ticket if your service is below par? If we are dissatisfied with a particular service, we might complain to friends, or post something negative on Twitter or LinkedIn, but the provider isn’t actively engaged in solving the problem until the issue has really escalated.”
Not that organisations don’t have some in-built resilience.
Many individual components of a typical tech stack have some diagnostic capabilities as standard but, in silo, they lack the ability to provide that critical (and game-changing) end-to-end view.
Also, the data is often presented poorly.
VOSS is recommending a better suite of performance management tools that is much more geared up to the cloud and getting insight into actual user sentiment – whilst also keeping a watch on the entire IT eco system with a deep dive where necessary by function, location, department, device or individual user.
Organisations can then really see which productivity apps employees do and do not use; when they were last active, how many messages are being sent, how many calls are being made, how many meetings are being attended and by whom.
They can also identify super-users, spot trends and predict bottle-necks; the full picture and critical findings can be readily accessed via an intuitive user interface and bespoke and impactful dashboards as required that can help drive and improve employee experience and, ultimately, organisational productivity.
In short, spotting, reporting and fixing those little nicks before they start to cut deep.
Now THAT’S sharp practice..!
To learn more about how VOSS can help your business digitize and thrive, click here
