“Fasten Your Seat Belts. We’re Experiencing Some DEX Turbulence.”

As I write this, I’m midway over the Atlantic on my manner again from visiting shoppers in Barcelona, Spain, the place I’ve spent the final two days sharing my analysis on digital worker expertise (DEX).

The DEX market continues to be red-hot, with practically one-third of decision-makers indicating that they’ll be investing in end-user expertise administration (EUEM) over the subsequent 12 months. However with a possible recession on the best way, prospects and distributors are more and more asking me how you can rework DEX from a nice-to-have to vital. The reply lies in connecting DEX to buyer outcomes.

DEX: A Hidden Driver Of Buyer Obsession?

For years, Forrester’s knowledge has proven a robust hyperlink between worker engagement and buyer outcomes. As our Worker Expertise Index exhibits, engaged workers usually tend to:

• Agree that their firm is customer-obsessed.
• Advocate their firm’s services and products to potential prospects.

As I write this submit, I’ve simply caught the information of the current Discover to Air Missions (NOTAM) laptop outage that impacted the airline business this morning in the USA. NOTAM is an important communication system that notifies key airline personnel of impactful occasions, akin to hazards, procedural updates, facility modifications, and extra. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) primarily makes use of the system to inform personnel shortly when different types of communication aren’t obtainable. With out NOTAM, planes can’t take off. Whereas the system is now again on-line, the outage resulted in 1000’s of delays and cancellations that left prospects stranded for the second time in as little as a number of weeks. Keep in mind Southwest?

Over the vacation season, points with legacy infrastructure prompted Southwest Airways to cancel roughly 16,000 flights. Commenting on the foundation reason for the cancellations, Captain Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airways Pilots Affiliation mentioned, “It’s telephones, it’s computer systems, it’s processing energy, it’s the applications used to attach us to airplanes — that’s the place the issue lies, and it’s systemic all through the entire airline.” In different phrases, the cancellations had been the results of an outdated digital worker expertise.

Poor DEX = Poor Buyer Expertise And Damaging Enterprise Outcomes

Whereas challenges akin to technical debt and cybersecurity underscore each NOTAM and Southwest, poor digital worker expertise clearly performed some function. For the FAA, it was actually a pc outage, one thing an EUEM device would have visibility over. Within the case of Southwest Airways, it was outdated worker scheduling instruments and units. Finally, poor efficiency and instability of the underlying computing surroundings prompted outages and delays that negatively impacted buyer expertise. The impression on Southwest’s enterprise was excessive:

• An instantaneous 7% stock-price decline in the course of the outage
• A $400–425 million income hit in This fall, based on the corporate

Might DEX Monitoring Have Prevented It All? Not Probably … However It Would Have Helped

In each instances, there are bigger problems with technical debt at play that may take time to unravel and modernize. Nonetheless, expertise monitoring instruments may have diminished the danger of an outage by making certain that one space of dependence — the endpoints working these programs — didn’t turn into a weak spot. With this use case in thoughts, it’s seemingly we’ll begin to see DEX enjoying in use instances akin to shared units and kiosks to:

• Monitor the well being of those endpoints.
• Proactively enhance the expertise earlier than points come up.
• Rapidly remediate occasions sooner once they do occur.
• Most significantly, restrict impression on prospects.

The hyperlink between buyer obsession and digital worker expertise is more and more clear. In case your group is really customer-obsessed, it should set a robust DEX basis. If you wish to study extra about how enterprises are enhancing DEX of their organizations, schedule an inquiry with me at [email protected].