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Create amazing user journeys through perspective driven EX

Lukasz Ulaniuk
October 8, 2020

There are numerous articles on experience measurement referenced under the names of user experience (UX), employee experience (EX), and customer experience (CX). To simplify things, let’s define UX as a process to design and create meaningful experiences for users when they interact with a product.[1] Adaptation of this process to the customer context is called CX and it encompasses the sum of experiences with services, brands, interactions, etc., while adaptation of the process  to the employee context is called EX, and it embraces all the touchpoints with digital workplace products and services: technology, physical space, support, and organizational culture. In this blog post, I will focus on EX.

Many of the publications I mentioned earlier propose various ways of quantifying experience and range from capturing subjective perspective through surveys alone, through analyzing hard data – potentially with the use of end-user monitoring tools, through to the combination of both and the use of AI capabilities (e.g., sentiment analysis). I think neither the subjective or the objective perspective alone can provide a full picture, hence I advocate the hybrid approach. However, the devil is in the details. Gathering solid evidence from the data and extracting meaning from employee feedback (e.g. from support tickets) often leads to combining these two perspectives and calculating a combined metric. What I propose is fundamentally different.  Let’s capture the subjective perception of the Digital Workplace. Let’s quantify it – it is what it is. Let’s represent it in various dimensions and qualities. But then, let’s use all the relevant data (from end-user monitoring, network monitoring, collaboration and productivity tools, ITSM tools, etc.) to explain where this perception came from and what is impacting it the most. (Is it an increase in network latency or a reduction of support tickets, or perhaps, usability of the new conference rooms?) And finally, what is the next level of experience and what is going to drive it in a positive or negative direction? How do we achieve this? See below:

  1. Start with personas – Understand your employees: who they are (define a personas catalogue), what drives them, how they leverage Digital Workplace capabilities for their daily work, what are their skills, what are their expectations. Map their journeys to identify obvious gaps.
  2. Define source systems, gather evidence – Look at the technology landscape, identify key systems and key metrics to feed data into the experience measurement, and map the data to personas.
  3. Ask questions and derive the score – Tailor the content of the survey to your personas and ask about experiences not about the score, group questions in respective categories: technology, physical space and support then calculate the employee experience score
  4. Explain the score – Use the data from the defined systems to estimate the weights of key metrics and calculate the impact score.
  5. Know where you are and where you will be – Represent calculated impacts in the personas and Digital Workplace dimensions. This will tell you what’s driving the experience the most (both in positive and negative terms). Because you already know the weights of your key metrics, you can not only baseline the experience; after a few months, you can also predict the next level of employee experience by leveraging historical data.
  6. Act – You can now assess effectiveness of current workplace technology in delivering a desirable user experience, identify bottlenecks in productivity, prioritize, and optimize improvements, trace historical changes to the employee experience.
  7. Repeat steps from 4 or 5 (surveys don’t need to be refreshed too often).

That’s all. Oh, and don’t forget about adoption of new services and products! Refer to our Digital Adoption offer for more details on how to enable Digital Transformation and increase ROI and to Connected Employee Framework  for a complete transformation journey approach and more details or contact me directly.

Download our Connected Experience Framework brochure here.

[1] As per Wikipedia defined as: products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments