By Hank Marquis

How to Improve Digital Employee Experience

Image Credit: pexels.com/@max-fischer

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

Quality of Experience (QoE) is one of the most important ideas in modern service delivery. It applies to every digital workplace solution, every cloud service, and every customer-facing system. And it begins with one simple truth: perceptions define success.

In experience terms, QoE is the judgment a person makes while using a service. The formula is straightforward: QoE = Perception – Expectation. That gap — positive or negative — is what shapes satisfaction, trust, and the stories people tell about IT.

If you manage IT services, five straightforward questions can reveal whether you are meeting consumer expectations. If the honest answer to any of them is “no” or “I don’t know,” dissatisfaction is already present, whether you can see it or not.

These five questions are widely used because they represent the current science of managing services through expectations. They also form part of the foundation described in Completely Satisfied, where digital experience is defined by the ongoing relationship between perception, expectation, and tolerance.

Where to Start Improving Digital Employee Experience

Almost every IT organization has at least one product, service, or solution that fails to meet employee expectations. That is the best starting point. Choose a service with recurring concerns and walk through these questions to understand where perceptions and expectations are drifting apart.

1. Do you have a plan of action to meet digital employee expectations for the five key service-quality aspects? Ask to see the written plan for each one, including the documented service levels required.
2. Have you blueprinted the solution standards needed to deliver that quality? The blueprint should include people, processes, products, and partners — and describe how each one must adapt. Roles, workflows, automation, and responsibilities all belong here.
3. Were people, processes, partners, and products actually implemented as blueprinted? This is impossible to verify without the blueprint in hand, but if the plan and design exist, you can check the results.
4. Do the systems and teams in place deliver to the defined standards? This means you have a way to measure their performance, and those measurements align with development and compensation systems.
5. Are communications to customers about service quality accurate and aligned? You must deliver what you promised, and what you promised must match what customers believe they will receive.

These steps assume you can relate perception to expectation. If you can’t, dissatisfaction is almost guaranteed — and this is where digital employee experience begins to break down.

This is also why the perception–expectation model in Completely Satisfied is central to Hailee’s workgroup digital twin. Hailee uses that model to interpret how people experience the service, where expectations are drifting, and which gaps matter most. Doing this manually requires surveys, blueprinting, interviews, service mapping, and months of reconciliation. Hailee applies the same logic automatically, making those mismatches easier to see before they escalate.

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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