Beyond Endpoint Metrics: Achieving True Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Today’s Challenge With DEX: Inferred vs. Actual Experience

I would argue that DEX solutions that exist out there today are more in line with a Digital Endpoint Experience instead of a Digital Employee Experience. DEX vendors may have ‘employee sentiment’ where an employee can give a subjective feel for how they felt technology performed today so these vendors can say “this is the employee part of DEX”. Sentiment is valuable, but when sentiment is contrary to how an endpoint performed then how can your organization possibly begin to resolve an employee’s experience with any predictability?

A poor performing endpoint with good sentiment feedback? I guess the endpoint metrics didn’t matter for what the user was experiencing and you can safely ignore metrics.

But what happens if you have a good performing endpoint with poor sentiment feedback? What do you do now?

These vendors have no answer and there is a good reason for that. They are actually blind to what the employee is experiencing and are instead trying to infer an employee’s experience from endpoint metrics. As long as it aligns, everything is hunky dory. But as soon as it conflicts it provides little value, or potentially worse, adds additional work.

The Complexity of Modern End-User Computing

Why wouldn’t the endpoint experience align with the employee experience? Software is magical in many ways. It can transport us to 3D worlds, augment information available to us and provide access to applications and desktops that exist on the other side of the world.

That last example is critical.

End-user computing (EUC) technologies like Citrix have given organizations the ability to provide desktops and applications to employee’s that run on machines that are not the endpoint you are typing on.

Administrators of these technologies will instantly understand the challenges with providing good experiences to users where they are connecting to other machines. Slow launching applications because of waiting for Windows to log the user on to the remote machine, using shared hardware to maximize user-density cost or even understanding if the application is bottlenecked through MHz or database locality are everyday challenges they face.

These challenges used to only exist in the realm of large enterprises. But the ever forward progress of technology has brought this to everyday people and businesses of any size. Solutions like Microsoft Windows 365 and the growth of “Cloud PC’s” have made this technology accessible to everyone. And one of the magical parts of Cloud PC’s is it requires very little resources on the endpoint you are physically touching in order to connect to one. This makes even the lowest powered endpoints capable of connecting to a Cloud PC and the employee can have a great experience! Companies like IGEL, StratoDesk and 10Zig have done an amazing job giving you the ability to repurpose old and dated hardware to connect to these Cloud PC’s because the demands on hardware to do this is, usually, very low. A low powered endpoint connecting to a fast Cloud PC can give a great experience.

But this would be an example of the performance of the endpoint aligning with the employee’s experience.

When Endpoint Metrics and Employee Experience Diverge

There are a lot of ways that an employee’s experience won’t match the endpoint metrics. Background processes, like antivirus scans, can consume significant resources and this could negatively impact a ‘endpoint’ score, even if a user doesn’t perceive an experience impact. Cloud PC’s can have a massive impact on an employee’s experience. Connections to Cloud PC’s, from the endpoint perspective, are just processes that run on the endpoint.

What happens when the Cloud PC has performance challenges? Does it impact the experience an employee has with technology? Absolutely.

Would the employee’s endpoint metrics match their experience when using a Cloud PC that has performance issues? No. And this is a BIG problem in DEX scoring.

ControlUp DEX: A True Digital Employee Experience Platform

Only one DEX solution in the market today focuses on the employee’s experience and context and uses endpoint data to augment the experience data. That solution is ControlUp DEX.

ControlUp’s DEX solution focuses on the Employee part of the DEX acronym. ControlUp DEX offers employee sentiment features comparable or superior to others in the DEX space. Bringing in an employee’s subjective data is important to tune the DEX score to try and best align what the employee says they are experiencing and what the data says they are experiencing.

ControlUp DEX also brings in data on tertiary technology that may impact an employee’s experience – like the quality of their unified communication tools, e.g. Zoom or Teams.

Like a variation of the old phrase, if a tree falls in the woods – does it make a sound? If a background app consumes significant resources or freezes for some time, but the employee doesn’t notice because it’s not their focus, did it actually impact experience? Like the tree falling in the woods, if we focus on what matters we can get to the answer faster and with more accuracy.

ControlUp DEX focuses on what matters by tracking actual user experience metrics like the responsiveness of the software running on the endpoint. You get real experience data as opposed to leaving you to infer the experience with metrics like CPU and memory alone. To improve that further, ControlUp DEX will put more weight on the foreground in-use application metrics in its DEX score. This puts a larger emphasis on the metrics of programs that the employee is actually using, removing the noise of background processes.

Lastly, ControlUp understands that context matters. If an employee is using a Cloud PC or remote application, ControlUp DEX can prefer the performance and experience metrics from those remote machines and put more emphasis on them in the DEX score. This understanding of context puts ControlUp in a whole other league to accurately determine an employee’s experience.

Ready to move beyond endpoint metrics and focus on the true digital employee experience? Discover how ControlUp DEX can transform your organization.

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