Utilizing analytics to understand digital journey and experience is a no-brainer. For a website, visibility based on analytics provides you with a caricature of the user: how he is interacting with the website, how long he is staying, where he is clicking. This vital information is the basis of strategic decisions that have a real impact on the bottom line of businesses. So, if analytics and visibility into the digital journey are so important, why is this not being applied to the employee digital experience?
The importance of analytics for understanding the customer’s digital journey has been underscored enough times to be considered common knowledge. Businesses, in turn, have pushed this objective in their transformational efforts, because they know there is a direct relation to revenue. Businesses work on reimaging digital offerings that are smooth and frictionless for their consumers, and customers should never feel a wave of anxiety and frustration when they face a digital interface; it’s bad for business! But what about the other humans in the business equation? Doesn’t the experience of employees, often defined by that very feeling of frustration and anxiety, also affect the bottom line? The short answer is yes, albeit indirectly.
Even those beginning to wake up to this idea — the importance of the employee digital experience — are met with considerable challenges. When optimizing a digital offering for the customer, data is owned and generated by the organization. Measuring and quantifying the user experience is, therefore, relatively straightforward. When it comes to the software interfaces that employees interact with, we are rarely dealing with in-house systems. Due to the ease of creating and implementing cloud-based software, there are a growing number of highly specialized platforms built for the modern workplace, each with their own internal logic. Vendors may offer their customers selective user analytics, but by nature, this information is siloed. The employee experience, on the other hand, spans platforms and systems, encompassing all the tasks and processes that an employee faces throughout their day.
To improve the employee digital experience, or even just understand the current employee digital experience paradigm, CIOs need visibility. Or, in other words, we need reliable, quantifiable metrics on the usage of the system. How else can we aptly steer the transformational ship? However obvious this might sound in theory, the practice of collecting data on platform usage and cross-platform business processes, like lead to cash or submitting expenses to get reimbursed, is not universal. Only a third of organizations collect data on their cloud computing. Given the price tag on enterprise software subscriptions, this is a surprising statistic. Without knowing how the platform is being used and without taking the necessary actions to optimize usage in order to get to the desired outcome, it is difficult if not impossible to determine its return on investment and, more importantly, ensure digital transformation success. Digital transformation, then, effectively becomes a guessing game.
Visibility means different things in different situations but, in this case, let’s define it as a snapshot of what is going on at the granular level of platform and adoption. Are employees taking advantage of the full potential of their CRM or are they using it like a glorified spreadsheet? True adoption of technology is achieving fluent usage moving from one system to another.
Ted Coine said it best: “Leaders can use IT to help make employees’ jobs richer and more meaningful … but usually, more software equals more paperwork.” CIOs who are making strategic designs without knowledge of how tools are used run the risk of making the workplace a more confusing, less efficient place. If you don’t know how the camera works, buying more lenses probably isn’t in your best interest.
Visibility is a superpower in today’s competitive digital environment. CIOs need to take a step back and survey their current digital ecosystem and ask questions: Why did we buy this platform? What are we hoping to gain? How will it be achieved? Collecting data is step one, but it isn’t enough. IT needs the ability to dive into a single monitoring platform and define business goals beyond it, like productivity, efficiency, experience and identifying potential bottlenecks.
It is important to create a more cohesive environment, one where departments collaborate and share knowledge, tools and best practices, not only with IT but with each other. Too often, departments are siloed but business processes go across departments and across different platforms, for example, with expense reporting. Expense reporting not only travels from the employee to the manager and then to the finance department, but also through different ERP and CRM systems. This poses more problems than one. With digital sprawl, it becomes nearly impossible for a CIO to achieve total visibility.
Ultimately, it is critical to remember that visibility is a tool to achieve the true goal: adoption. Having user analytics is like having a roadmap so we can say, “This is where we are in the transformation journey and this is where we need to be.” A state of adoption is where businesses need to be to power digital transformation. Digital platforms that are fully adopted are being used in a flow state. When this happens, employee experience thrives because the platform is simply an extension of the self. Just like a professional photographer no longer needs to fumble around with shutter speed, your employees will be able to do their jobs without thinking about the framework of the tools they are using. This drives not only transformation objectives but employee satisfaction, productivity and, yes, the bottom line.
