Digital transformation has been an IT buzzword for the past five years. And each organization is carrying out their own unique digital transformation journey, discovering the best way to adopt digital technologies and practices into their core business processes and collaboration methods. An important element of digital transformation is, of course, technology. But often, it’s more about the user experience, the digital employee experience. Without optimizing their experience, the entire transformation journey is at risk. And the responsibility for digital experience optimization (DXO) rests completely on IT operations and technical support within the organization.
Having a single, integrated solution that gathers all digital performance data from the end-user perspective is essential for monitoring, tracking, and troubleshooting issues to deliver the best digital experience for all employees. OfficeExpert TrueDEM offers a new and fundamentally different approach to optimize the Microsoft 365 digital experience and accelerate the digital transformation for communications and collaboration.
The key business benefits of OfficeExpert TrueDEM are described in this blog, including:
- Reducing IT support troubleshooting time from Days to Minutes
- Proactively finding digital experience issues and addressing them quickly
- Creating proven, baseline requirements for devices and network performance
Business Value Estimates from Digital Experience Optimization
The next subsection explains the potential benefits and cost savings from implementing a DXO strategy with a comprehensive solution. Quantifying the DXO business value from an IT operations perspective uses estimated efficiency gains and average cost models for resources and time spent during IT support activities. For end-user benefits, an average cost model is applied from the expected increase in productivity using the available Microsoft Teams total economic impact (TEI) study created by Forrester Research in 2019.
1. Reduce IT Support Costs with Integrated Solution
Description
- Empower IT operations and support groups with complete visibility of end-to-end performance data for all employees (devices, networks, cloud services, etc.) to perform fast troubleshooting for reported issues.
Capability Enablers
- Digital experience metrics from the user perspective (end-to-end digital journey details)
- Smart agents gathering telemetry data from user devices (historic metrics and real-time)
- Drill-down reporting with integrated data overlays and graphical charts to identify issues
- Integration with Microsoft CQD data to cross-reference performance anomalies
KPI Impact
- Assume 10,000 knowledge workers using Microsoft Teams
- Assume 1% of users report Teams performance issues monthly
- Assume $50/hour average fully loaded salary for IT operations engineers
- Reduce time spent gathering log data and performance metrics from different tools by 4-hours/trouble ticket
- Reduce number of IT operations FTEs needed for troubleshooting by 2 FTEs (networking, and desktop support)
- Resulting in a $480k reduction per year in support tasks overhead
- Assume recapture of 10%-20% Benefit Realization (or 1 FTE in IT operations group)
- Results in $96k in Annual efficiency savings
2. Proactive Remediation for Performance Issues
Description
- Leverage comprehensive, end-to-end performance metrics and available BI reports to spotlight users with digital experience issues. Identify the area of responsibility to analyze the root cause and remediate the problem to improve the employees’ productivity.
Capability Enablers
- Holistic performance data gathered from all user endpoint devices
- Collation and aggregation of all telemetry data to simplify analysis and problem identification
- Drill-down reporting and data analytics within a single UI to speed research
- Grouping similar performance problems to identify a single fix for multiple users
KPI Impact
- Assume 10,000 knowledge workers using Microsoft Teams
- Assume 10% of users are experiencing Teams call quality issues
- Assume average time lost during a poor-quality call of 2-mins (loss in productivity)
- Assume each knowledge worker joins 50 Teams calls per month on average
- Resulting in 20,000 hours of lost productivity per year
- Assume $50/hour average fully loaded knowledge worker
- Results in $1M in Annual Productivity Gains by fixing user performance issues
3. Standard Baseline Requirements for DXO
Description
- Establish standard requirements for all devices and network performance to ensure Microsoft Teams users have an optimal digital experience. Drive the adoption of Teams by ensuring an excellent experience and realize the productivity gains from modernized communications and collaboration methods.
Capability Enablers
- Leverage end-to-end performance metrics to create baselines for acceptable digital experience
- Enforce minimum standards for hardware and network configurations for remote workers
- Monitor performance dashboards and quickly identify non-standard performance outliers for remediation
- Regularly audit office locations to review digital experience performance scorecards
KPI Impact
- Assume 10,000 knowledge workers transitioning to Microsoft Teams
- Assume 45-mins of time could be saved per week by using more efficient methods of collaboration in Microsoft Teams (reference from Forrester Research Report – 2019)
- Assume 5% of employees have poor performance issues running Teams
- Resulting in 19,500 hours per year of potential productivity gains that are not realized
- Assume $50/hour average fully loaded knowledge worker
- Results in $975k in potential Productivity Gains through DXO Implementation
Customer Case Study – Benefits Realized
A recently published case study covers the specific business value realized after implementing the OfficeExpert TrueDEM solution. This financial services organization was able to drive DXO initiatives based on the accurate and actionable insights provided by the end-to-end monitoring data.
During this first 3-months after the deployment the detailed information provided by OfficeExpert TrueDEM proved so invaluable that they made five major modifications to their network routing and desktop computer standards to improve Teams voice performance. The subsequent improvements to Teams voice call quality were astounding. In the following 3-months after the device hardware enhancements and network routing changes the Teams call quality performance improved dramatically.
A key observation about the direct business value for reducing IT support costs came from their IT Director responsible for Unified Communications. He stated, “OfficeExpert TrueDEM EPM helped troubleshoot our Teams voice rollout. Users were frustrated with inconsistent performance and dropped calls. Over half of our calls were experiencing poor quality. Using OfficeExpert TrueDEM we were able to spotlight major problems with network routing and hardware limitations. Using new, data-driven insights we were able to fix the issues and improve user productivity.”
| Reduced IT Troubleshooting Time | Improved User Productivity |
| IT operations groups tasked with investigating and troubleshooting Teams call quality issues were spending an average of 12-hours per helpdesk trouble ticket. This encapsulates time spent by three different support groups, including Desktop Support, Network Engineering, and the Microsoft 365 / Teams Support group to run tools and gather data for analysis. By leveraging OfficeExpert TrueDEM the average amount of time spent by IT operations groups has dropped considerably. The estimated amount of time to process a Teams call quality trouble ticket is just 15-minutes. And that time is now spent by a single IT support person, instead of three. | OfficeExpert TrueDEM empowered the IT operations group to effectively spotlight the root-causes of Teams call quality issues so they could be remediated quickly. The Microsoft classifications for Poor Quality calls were reduced from 54% to 13% during the first 6-months after the implementation. The estimated time savings by improving the quality of Teams calls / meetings across the entire organization is just over 3,800 hours per month. This estimate uses a conservative calculation of just 1-minute of lost productivity for every garbled conversation or dropped call that was included in the Microsoft CQD reports. |
Monitoring Performance from the End-User Perspective
To make digital experience optimization (DXO) possible it is essential to monitor and measure the performance from the device level, from the user endpoint. This provides complete visibility into their performance with telemetry data from their perspective—network traces, performance metrics, and logs—that describe activity across the entire digital journey. Among the business benefits of OfficeExpert TrueDEM, it leverages smart agents that are deployed to every end-user PC (Windows/Mac), running in the end-user context. The results are the true end-user performance results, not fast tracks or backdoors like running under System or Admin accounts.
Using this approach, OfficeExpert TrueDEM provides detailed performance metrics about each endpoint itself, the local network (home, office or public), the Internet Service Provider (ISP) performance, the end user´s peering distance with Microsoft, even the Authentication and API performance for that specific user session with Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive. The entire digital user journey for every individual employee in end-user context is covered. This viewpoint represents the TRUE digital experience of each user.
Integrated vs. Siloed Approach
One significant business benefits of OfficeExpert TrueDEM is that it provides a single pane-of-glass to view all integrated metrics for the digital experience optimization of Microsoft 365. The SaaS solution stores a comprehensive set of end-to-end performance data from all user endpoints. This allows one IT operations engineer to analyze and troubleshoot issues without having to toggle between different tools, and more importantly, to perform the research without needing assistance from other IT engineers.
Many solution vendors only focus on monitoring endpoint performance or network data, storing their information in completely siloed environments. With telemetry data in different silos, it is extremely difficult to see the big picture and identify issues that may affect the digital experience for any user. For example, if a network trace shows a spike in latency from an office location or a drop in the rate of system connections, it can be hard to assess if any users were impacted. This requires IT operations groups to double up, pulling data out of different systems and cobble together performance metrics for analysis.
Overhead like this can increase the mean time to resolution (MTTR) on trouble tickets reported to the helpdesk and lead to reduced productivity for those impacted users. But a bigger problem is that some issues may go completely unnoticed, since the affected users may never call the helpdesk. OfficeExpert TrueDEM has you covered in one integrated solution that monitors the complete, end-to-end digital journey for users and spotlights poor performance so that IT operations can proactively analyze the problem and implement a fix.
Trust OfficeExpert TrueDEM for Digital Experience Optimization and Endpoint Management
Enterprise organizations need scalable, efficient, and cost-effective solutions for monitoring and managing the digital experience for their employees. And the solution MUST be able to gather telemetry data whether the employee is working at an office location on a managed network, or away from the office on their own home network.
Most IT monitoring solutions lack a 360-degree view of the end-to-end digital experience for users, leaving IT forced to use multiple tools and monitor silos of information without sufficient context for timely troubleshooting. OfficeExpert TrueDEM, on the other hand, was architected from the ground up to provide IT operations groups with access to the complete picture, shining a light on all aspects of their employees’ end-to-end digital experience, no matter where they are working. And since the information is gathered from each device endpoint, the telemetry data provides the insights needed to pinpoint issues, identify the area of responsibility, and make informed decisions to optimize their employees’ digital experience.
Key benefits include:
- Fast remediation for reported issues on digital experience
- Proactive identification for performance problems with details on what to fix
- Historic research and analysis for digital experience performance (1+ years of data)
- Baseline reporting and trend analysis for digital experience across the organization
If you are interested in finding out more about the many business benefits of OfficeExpert TrueDEM and how it can help you proactively optimize the digital experience for your organization, please visit our overview page online, or sign-up for a trial.
