Effective Management of your DEM Solution

We are all living digitally right now, at work and at home. In our normal day-to-day lives, digital experiences are also pervasive as both consumers and employees. In Gartner’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Market Guide (September 2019), improving user digital experience was placed at the center of any digital transformation project. DEM is a crucial part of this, and effectively managing your DEM solution will allow you to maximize its ability to help your company achieve its digital transformation goals.

Effective Management Starts with Collaboration

In the last blog, we looked at the three different business groups that often meet at the site of DEM: IT teams who procure and manage the tooling daily, customer experience (CX) teams who use the end data to help meet customer expectations for all interactions with their company website and apps, and employee experience (EX) teams who require the data that DEM provides to measure and understand how their employees are experiencing the digital workplace.

Understand Shared Responsibility

There can be challenges as these three teams navigate their differing needs and requirements. There is sometimes shared responsibility or overlap of different DEM components among IT, CX and EX, and in our experience, it works best when all three teams acknowledge any overlap and come up with a shared plan to best assess and execute their performance monitoring needs.

Build a Rigorous Planning Process

As part of the planning process, the kind of questions that might arise include:

• What DEM tools are needed? Synthetic, RUM, enterprise, or a combination of all three?
• Who is going to take responsibility for implementing DEM?
• What metrics are most important for business KPIs?
• How frequently will information be shared internally? Who will it be shared with and how?

IT has its own admins and people who will regularly look at the data provided by DEM. They need clear guidelines in place for the work that needs to get done, who is accountable for what, who needs what data, and how often. Is the data modified before sharing with other teams to help them understand which areas to focus on? Do they prefer it raw? These discussions need to be had.

If there is insufficient clarity at the outset, you could end up in a situation in which all three teams are stepping over one another instead of effectively collaborating. IT is usually juggling many projects at the same time (from managing networks to determining hosting environments to dealing with ISPs and SaaS providers), and it’s unfair to rely on them to execute all aspects without consultation.

In order to effectively maximize your DEM solution, it’s important for leaders from each team to kick things off by acknowledging what needs to get gone, decide who will do it, figure out if you have the right tools, and establish clear guidelines for how the data obtained by those tools will be shared among the groups who need it.

Avoid Messy Situations

If clear planning isn’t undertaken, you could easily find yourself in a messy situation: IT overwhelmed and unsure what to prioritize while the customer team and employee team do their own thing. Eventually, management has to step in to help disentangle the inevitable finger-pointing, only to find itself forced to hire third-party companies to help navigate internal systems, wasting money and resources.

Data Serves an Important Function

This work is important. Customer experience and employee experience need neutral, actionable data for their own purposes. Indeed, it’s important for the health of the company and success of the business. Our advice is to ensure you identify and highlight the important data, and figure out who is accountable early-on. Set yourself up to have the right tech in place so that you can capture end-user experience at the customer and employee level, and figure out how you will then share that data for maximum effect.

IT, CX and EX must work together to make effective use of their DEM solution. In our next blog in the series, we’ll look at real use cases of companies, with whom Catchpoint works, who are effectively integrating IT, EX and CX, and seeing the results pay off.

The next part of this series looks at how two Fortune 100 companies leveraged Catchpoint to improve customer and employee experience.

[Download a copy of the Gartner DEM market guide](https://pages.catchpoint.com/2019-gartner-dem-market-guide?utm_source=adwords&utm_campaign=Digital+Experience+Monitoring&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term=digital experience monitoring&hsa_kw=digital experience monitoring&hsa_mt=b&hsa_tgt=kwd-296800800427&hsa_src=g&hsa_ad=398642246291&hsa_ver=3&hsa_cam=8180984140&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_acc=4939318129&hsa_grp=84523937997&gclid=CjwKCAjwsMzzBRACEiwAx4lLGwOJ4i5y0OzXsxTRljRdDHvWjyd97hKMoP6UXPV1yl1Xjr07E3Ml2BoCipMQAvD_BwE)  to understand more about the benefits of DEM.