DEM: Where IT Meets Customer Experience and Employee Experience

Over the past decade, our world has become increasingly digital. Many studies including one from  IDC  estimated that as of next year, 50% of global GDP would be digitized and by 2022, $1.97T will be spent on digital transformation (DX) of business practices, products, and organizations. Much of this includes changes to how businesses interact with data, from AI and ML to digital experience monitoring (DEM).

“This shift toward capital funding is an important one as business executives come to recognize digital transformation as a long-term investment. This commitment to funding DX will continue to drive spending well into the next decade,”

Shawn Fitzgerald, IDC research director, Worldwide Digital Transformation Strategies.

Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 60% of IT leaders will drive new opportunities and business innovation through the use of disruptive technologies, such as the cloud and AI, up from less than 5% in 2019. Katherine Lord, research vice president at Gartner, urged I&O leaders who may have been “siloed into a tactical role rather than a strategic one” to “lead through disruption”, and forge new digital initiatives “to ensure that business is ready for the future.”

We are just experiencing a MAJOR disruption with workforces worldwide being mandated to work from home to help slow the spread of COVID-19. This crisis is forcing companies to transform at a painfully fast pace, causing stress and anxiety. In the long run, however, good things will come out of this.

Digital initiatives are a consistent business priority globally, now more than ever.

As a result of the rapid digitization of the economy, company priorities and management are changing. Companies will gain an advantage not necessarily through new products or services, but rather through software development and how digital technology is used to remake a process to become more efficient or effective.

Changing Corporate Culture and Business Processes to Bring About Digital Transformation

Digital transformation (DX) is not related to tech alone, changing business processes and corporate culture is just as crucial to its success. This is true for both digital startups and large, established organizations straddling traditional business initiatives and DX.

All forms of enterprise are increasingly moving towards a digital workplace.

What do we mean by this? The digital workplace is the concept that businesses use DX to align business, employee and technology processes to improve operational efficiency and achieve organizational goals. At the heart of DX and the digital workplace are customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).

The Growing World of Customer Experience

Customer experience has always been important for enterprise, but now it is at the top of the executive agenda. Companies are assigning CX leaders and building teams with clear responsibilities and accountability within the enterprise.

CX management involves designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. CX isn’t tied to any one aspect of a customer’s journey, but instead describes your customers’ perception of their experience with your business or brand. CX is the end result of every single interaction a customer has, from their experience navigating your website to receiving the product or service they bought.

The Evolving Employee Experience Landscape

Employees are also seen as a differentiator. EX is tied to CX. It’s tough to get the best and it’s tough to retain them. Digital workplace initiatives aim to boost digital dexterity in employees and enhance employee experience, leading to higher rates of retention, and visible improvements in effectiveness and productivity. Greater customer satisfaction and profit are often the helpful byproducts of improved EX.

In a recent report on digital dexterity, Gartner notes that employees with high levels of digital dexterity (referring to “employees’ ambition to build digital businesses, and their ambition and ability to work digitally”) are 3.3 times more likely to deliver digital business outcomes than their peers with only moderate digital dexterity.

Forrester agrees that improving digital employee experience (DEX) is a business imperative. I&O professionals “increasingly understand the direct link between poor technology experience and employee disengagement, burnout, and attrition.”

DEM: Where IT Meets CX and EX

Customer experience is, of course, broader than what we do at Catchpoint. However, we offer one pivotal aspect: we help you maintain the performance levels your customers expect.

Likewise, for employee experience. HR measures EX in multiple ways: surveys, one-to-one feedback, digital dexterity measures, etc. Catchpoint’s DEM solution can help bolster EX by ensuring your employees have the reachability and availability to the digital tools they need to do their best work.

The piece of CX and EX that involves digital performance is the Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) part. This is where IT steps in to take responsibility for measuring digital performance, asking questions such as:

• What are the specific issues around application accessibility?
• How long does it take to download a file?
• Is the performance issue related to the network?
• Which point in the network is experiencing problems?

While IT is primarily responsible for DEM, the newly emerging teams in CX and EX are responsible for leading the digital workplace transformation. They need the data that DEM provides to help evaluate customer and employee experience. All three departments must work together to achieve success.

How Catchpoint can help you with Digital Transformation

Catchpoint can help you achieve digital transformation in several ways, including:

• Executing digital transformation projects – CX and EX leaders can use DEM insights to validate the outcome of DX initiatives with neutral, actionable data from the end-user perspective to prove the transformation;
• Aiding IT teams with Cloud migration and SaaS – measuring digital performance before, during and after migration;
• Improving the quality of products and services – by performance benchmarking with company competitors;
• Supporting CX and EX initiatives – by baselining and monitoring digital user experience (customer and employee). Getting the most from your digital technologies demands a transparent view of your IT infrastructure and how well it meets the needs of your end-user, both customer and employee. Catchpoint helps companies effectively manage both those priorities.

Our next blog in this series explains how you can effectively manage the DEM solution you use.