In a post-COVID world, the best performing enterprises need to take an innovative approach to guarantee IT service reliability and optimize home networking stack for troubleshooting visibility.

Exoprise, a leader in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions, announced the findings of its latest research survey, which identifies the role of IT in shaping Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for a hybrid working environment. In the recent partner survey, which covered over 2000 digital workplace employees and 1000 IT decision-makers (ITDM) in Northern America, Exoprise found that enterprises are still struggling to manage a work-from-anywhere (WFA) audience and deliver a positive digital experience.

Critically, 70% of IT leaders that responded believe DEX needs to be prioritized in 2023. Otherwise, they risk falling behind their competitors. The report also found that unreliable IT equipment and services were the second most important factor behind employee burnout and turnover. Additionally, 15% of employees would leave their jobs due to poor experience with everyday productivity tools like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and more. Finally, an astounding 90% of knowledge workers continually face technical and remote network problems, whether from home, in the office, or in-between, which hurts productivity, introduces delays, and reduces satisfaction.

“Today’s companies are at an interesting juncture where collaboration between IT and business leaders has grown like never before,” said Jason Lieblich, Exoprise CEO. “The reliance on digital tools and real-time collaboration continues unabated with increased support demand, expectations, and cost. Our research shows that despite the possibility of tightened tech spending next year, corporations will have to invest in DEM solutions like Exoprise Service Watch and doing so will have a positive return-on-investment.”

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Additional key findings from the research include the following:

Because of COVID-19, digital work shifted to the home office. According to the 2022 statistics, about 40 million Americans depend on their laptops for daily job activities. Research showed that virtually all knowledge workers in the U.S. want a better experience with their technology usage. As a result, IT needs to optimize an employee’s world by keeping the remote endpoint in mind and offering a better root cause analysis effort. The results also showed that older monitoring tools do not fit with the overall goals of a WFA enterprise.

In an era where employees need flexibility and work from home, digital friction has remained prevalent. Problem areas include dropped calls from platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Cisco Webex, slow page loading, application crashes, unresponsive endpoint devices and more. 75% of respondents indicated that slow network response time and unpredictable application performance were the biggest impediments to productivity. These disruptions tend to occur several times a week if not captured, diagnosed, and resolved in a timely manner.

Lack of application and network visibility increases employee frustration and inhibits business growth. Almost half of the survey respondents indicated that their devices operated more slowly outside the company’s network, affecting their productivity and engagement levels. Most of these respondents either try to solve problems of inferior performance by themselves or get validation from their co-workers. Only a few (12%) indicated they escalated to the helpdesk or submitted tickets. That number is low because the problems go unfixed or take longer to resolve, sometimes days or weeks, with a lack of resolution.

Although organizations have started to invest in DEX/DEM solutions internal employees are not clear who is responsible for implementation and service-level agreements. A quarter of employees feel that IT is involved in creating a better digital experience, while the rest feel that a new team outside of IT is doing so. Three-quarters of ITDM believe that it is their team that must support a hybrid workforce facing day-to-day technological challenges.

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