By Hank Marquis

How to Improve Digital Employee Experience

Q: How can IT meet the digital expectations of its business consumers?
A: By understanding their perceptions and ensuring IT

solutions meet them.

Quality of Experience (QoE) is the most significant factor in delivering any service, including cloud services and digital workplace solutions—and perceptions are critical to your success.

QoE is an assessment made by a service consumer during service consumption. It has a formula: QoE = Perception - Expectation

If you manage IT services, your answers to five simple questions can help determine whether you're meeting consumer expectations. If your answer is "no" or "I don't know" to any of the five, your customers are likely dissatisfied with your service:

• If you're in corporate IT, this dissatisfaction means your service is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, contributing to corporate failure.
• If you're a cloud provider, you're losing business to your competition.
• Nonprofits and governmental IT organizations are wasting money.

These five questions represent state-of-the-art thinking in service management—the formal science of managing services, particularly managing by employee and customer expectations.

Where to Start Improving Digital Employee Experience

Most IT leaders and providers have at least one product, service, or solution that doesn't meet customer expectations for quality or value. This is where you should begin. Choose a service with performance concerns, then follow these steps and answer these questions:

1. Do you have a plan of action to meet digital employee expectations for the five service quality aspects? Ask for each element's written plan and the documented service levels required.
2. Have you blueprinted IT solution standards to meet each quality aspect? Confirm that the blueprint includes this solutions people, processes, products, and partners. It identifies how each one must change and to what degree to meet your plan. It should include job descriptions, new roles, process changes, automation, etc.
3. Were people, processes, partners, and products implemented as blueprinted? Verify that it happened—tough to do without no. 2 above, but check the results if you have a written plan and a blueprint.
4. Do the systems and people put in place deliver to defined standards? Validate that you have the means to measure your teams' performance against the new requirements. These new requirements must align with employee development and compensation systems.
5. Are communications to customers about service quality standards correct? Ensure you're delivering what you promised and what the customer expected, and ensure the customer's perception matches yours.

These steps imply that you can relate employee perception and expectation. If you can't, your customers are likely dissatisfied, and this is where to start improving your #DEX.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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