Enterprises are putting a lot of effort into improving the digital employee experience (DEX), which has become essential to both improving organizational performance and attracting and retaining talented workers. But to date, most efforts to deliver outstanding DEX have focused on people working with laptops, PCs, or thin clients. Employees on the frontlines, using mobile devices to handle logistics, who work the shop floor or make the rounds visiting hospital patients, have been largely overlooked.

This represents a sizeable gap for organizations looking to put their data to the best use. Mobile users are interacting with customers, shippers, patients, and a host of others in fields ranging from vehicle rentals and retail stores to insurance claims and government services. The quality of their user experience directly impacts company performance and their own job satisfaction, just as much as DEX affects employees anywhere else in an organization.

With the right observability tools, however, organizations can bring the same level of visibility, device telemetry and artificial intelligence-powered analytics to mobile users that they do elsewhere in the organization.

Most Current Technologies Don't Connect With Mobile Users

Depending on the organization, mobile devices can make up a pretty big chunk of a company's IT equipment. Gartner projects that companies will spend $61.5 billion on mobile devices this year, a 1.4% increase from 2023, buying 155 million phones, laptops, and other devices.

Yet most observability vendors limit their DEX offerings to laptop/PC users, leaving frontline workers without tools that can proactively detect and resolve issues, easily access the right information at the right time and improve customer service. Organizations also suffer overall, since IT teams that lack visibility into the experience of their mobile users have no idea of whether issues are affecting revenue, productivity, job satisfaction or even healthcare outcomes.

Current enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions fall short in this area because, while they offer control over applications and security measures, they don't provide visibility into application and device performance. Traditional, agent-based DEX solutions allow visibility only into Windows devices. They are unable to work with Android and iOS devices and apps — which constitute the majority of devices in use. Specialized handheld devices such as those from Zebra feature some mobile DEX capabilities, but only within their own proprietary environments.

The Advantages of a True Mobile DEX Solution

A true Mobile DEX solution works with iOS and Android devices from multiple vendors in a variety of form factors, including ruggedized devices and free-standing kiosks. It can gather full-fidelity device and network telemetry, perform AI-enhanced analytics, and deliver actionable insights on network performance and user engagement at both the network and the device levels, tracking use even as employees switch devices.

At the device level, for example, Mobile DEX can gather a wide variety of metrics to proactively identify and resolve digital experience issues, which can range from network connections and device configurations to hardware health, such as its storage, RAM, and CPU performance. Good Mobile DEX can even monitor peripheral factors like battery drain and charging rates. It can also provide data on the signal strength of Wi-Fi or cellular networks.

A solution making use of AI and machine learning (ML) can also keep close tabs on employee sentiment and the quality of their user experience. IT can, for example, send customized information to employee's individual devices soliciting feedback on any service quality issues. In addition to resolving issues, it can offer guidance on what employees can do to improve their own experience, such as providing information about installing apps or using them for the first time or adapting a device for use in a new location.

Users can also receive proactive information about outages, or warnings when usage limits set by corporate policy are about to be reached.

At the network level, it can monitor every corporate app for usage, including start and stop times for apps, as well as any instances of an app crashing. To ensure compliance with corporate use policies, a Mobile DEX solution also can analyze usage patterns of apps and websites.

That data gives IT teams valuable insights into the effects app usage and performance have on an organization's productivity and security.

Conclusion

The importance of improving the digital experience for all employees is clear. In Riverbed's Global DEX Survey, 91% of IT and business decision-makers acknowledged that they need to provide better DEX or suffer the consequences, with 63% saying that poor DEX could result in damage to a company's productivity, performance or reputation. And 68% said that employees — particularly younger, digital native employees in the millennial and Generation Z categories — would leave the company if their user experience didn't meet their expectations.

More than 90% of decision makers said they planned to invest in DEX technologies, but until now the available technologies haven't addressed mobile users. A platform that brings unified observability to mobile devices can provide a cohesive view of the mobile digital employee experience, incorporating that segment of users into efforts to improve DEX throughout the enterprise. Company performance will improve along with it.