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Want to Keep Your Employees? Prioritize Their Digital Experience

Mike Marks
Riverbed

Companies have historically relied on tools that warn IT teams when their digital systems are experiencing glitches or attacks. But in an age where consumer loyalty is fickle and hybrid workers' Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is paramount for productivity, companies cannot afford to retroactively deal with IT failures that slow down employee productivity.

What if, instead, companies considered proactive solutions to their digital experience that provided greater visibility into the potential pitfalls of their IT systems? Rather than reactively dealing with the aftermath of digital downfalls, companies can take matters into their own hands by assessing how their employees are reacting to the applications in play.

With 74% of Millennial and GenZ workers taking over the workforce, employees have an increased expectation on the efficiency of their digital work experience. The digital landscape is quickly evolving, and companies have to keep up if they want to deliver a digital experience that improves employee productivity, customer experience, and business performance. Below are three ways that real-time employee feedback allows for greater IT effectiveness, uncovers what's working well, and flags potential pitfalls.

Creating Tailored Solutions for Employee Feedback Helps Proactively Improve a Company's Digital Experience

Tailored surveys that span across devices and locations can provide companies with targeted areas of IT optimization and improvement. Companies need to also consider an employee's digital buy-in and how that affects productivity and retention. Employee buy-in is a key component for successful digital transformation within a company.

By implementing real-time feedback that pairs qualitative telemetry with contextual user data, companies can gain a more accurate assessment of how their applications are performing and where they can improve. Prioritizing real-time feedback ultimately leads to a better employee experience, customer satisfaction, and optimal business outcomes.

Integrating Real-Time Employee Feedback Tools Like XLAs Aid in Employee Digital Buy-in

Implementing experience-level agreements (XLA) that integrate both employee and customer insights can help companies assess users' levels of satisfaction and identify trends. XLAs add significant value to companies by providing insight into the employee digital experience through quantitative feedback and qualitative metrics.

The key differentiator between a traditional SLA (service level agreement) and an XLA is that XLAs not only provide transactional metrics of a department but also provide IT and LOB leaders with metrics on the level of satisfaction and preferences users have with a given application. Additionally, XLAs help business leaders analyze trends in the context of their overall processes and provide guidance on improving policies, prioritizing investments and identifying skills gaps.

Optimizing the Employee Digital Experience Will Lead to Better Business Outcomes

Companies need to first assess their business goals, particularly around customer success, and then determine how a stronger employee digital experience is helping or hurting their bottom line. Companies must consider how to practically integrate real-time employee feedback that helps them gain visibility into the employee digital experience and proactively address potential IT problems and solutions.

Proactive engagement with employees allows greater insight into digital acceptance and overall satisfaction with the IT experience. Furthermore, knowing how the day-to-day operations of the digital experience are affecting employees allows companies to know where to improve their IT systems and applications. What companies must understand is that placing a high value on digital visibility and employee success is critical to retaining top talent.

The Way Forward

As companies seek to implement actionable steps toward real-time feedback, they will begin to improve employee satisfaction and productivity that leads to optimal business success. Additionally, providing tailored solutions for employee feedback serves to create a more positive and streamlined experience for their employees. When employees are happy, companies realize increased customer success, and this combination is key to yielding positive business outcomes for companies both now and in the future.

Mike Marks is VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed

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Want to Keep Your Employees? Prioritize Their Digital Experience

Mike Marks
Riverbed

Companies have historically relied on tools that warn IT teams when their digital systems are experiencing glitches or attacks. But in an age where consumer loyalty is fickle and hybrid workers' Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is paramount for productivity, companies cannot afford to retroactively deal with IT failures that slow down employee productivity.

What if, instead, companies considered proactive solutions to their digital experience that provided greater visibility into the potential pitfalls of their IT systems? Rather than reactively dealing with the aftermath of digital downfalls, companies can take matters into their own hands by assessing how their employees are reacting to the applications in play.

With 74% of Millennial and GenZ workers taking over the workforce, employees have an increased expectation on the efficiency of their digital work experience. The digital landscape is quickly evolving, and companies have to keep up if they want to deliver a digital experience that improves employee productivity, customer experience, and business performance. Below are three ways that real-time employee feedback allows for greater IT effectiveness, uncovers what's working well, and flags potential pitfalls.

Creating Tailored Solutions for Employee Feedback Helps Proactively Improve a Company's Digital Experience

Tailored surveys that span across devices and locations can provide companies with targeted areas of IT optimization and improvement. Companies need to also consider an employee's digital buy-in and how that affects productivity and retention. Employee buy-in is a key component for successful digital transformation within a company.

By implementing real-time feedback that pairs qualitative telemetry with contextual user data, companies can gain a more accurate assessment of how their applications are performing and where they can improve. Prioritizing real-time feedback ultimately leads to a better employee experience, customer satisfaction, and optimal business outcomes.

Integrating Real-Time Employee Feedback Tools Like XLAs Aid in Employee Digital Buy-in

Implementing experience-level agreements (XLA) that integrate both employee and customer insights can help companies assess users' levels of satisfaction and identify trends. XLAs add significant value to companies by providing insight into the employee digital experience through quantitative feedback and qualitative metrics.

The key differentiator between a traditional SLA (service level agreement) and an XLA is that XLAs not only provide transactional metrics of a department but also provide IT and LOB leaders with metrics on the level of satisfaction and preferences users have with a given application. Additionally, XLAs help business leaders analyze trends in the context of their overall processes and provide guidance on improving policies, prioritizing investments and identifying skills gaps.

Optimizing the Employee Digital Experience Will Lead to Better Business Outcomes

Companies need to first assess their business goals, particularly around customer success, and then determine how a stronger employee digital experience is helping or hurting their bottom line. Companies must consider how to practically integrate real-time employee feedback that helps them gain visibility into the employee digital experience and proactively address potential IT problems and solutions.

Proactive engagement with employees allows greater insight into digital acceptance and overall satisfaction with the IT experience. Furthermore, knowing how the day-to-day operations of the digital experience are affecting employees allows companies to know where to improve their IT systems and applications. What companies must understand is that placing a high value on digital visibility and employee success is critical to retaining top talent.

The Way Forward

As companies seek to implement actionable steps toward real-time feedback, they will begin to improve employee satisfaction and productivity that leads to optimal business success. Additionally, providing tailored solutions for employee feedback serves to create a more positive and streamlined experience for their employees. When employees are happy, companies realize increased customer success, and this combination is key to yielding positive business outcomes for companies both now and in the future.

Mike Marks is VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...