Digital Experience Monitoring for remote teams - Insights from Forrester

IT teams face many visibility challenges due to the massive shift to remote work due to the Coronavirus outbreak. This includes the variability of home network environments, reliance on SaaS and cloud applications, the unpredictability of Internet transport, and higher congestion than ever before. How do you overcome these monitoring challenges? In this post, we provide a summary of some of the important takeaways from our recent webcast with guest, Rich Lane from Forrester on “Managing Remote Employee Experience”.

Over the past couple of months, Forrester has fielded dozens of inquiries from companies across the globe that are transitioning their workforce from the office into the home. According to Rich Lane, Forrester Senior Analyst, some of the top inquiries received from clients responsible for monitoring remote teams include:

• What is the root cause of my SaaS performance issue?
• Are vendor SLA’s being met?
• Experiencing application slowness across only a sub-set of branch offices.
• How do I troubleshoot performance issues in the cloud?
• How can I measure the digital experience of my end users?

The rise in remote working has brought a new set of challenges that did not exist when employees worked exclusively from an office and the end users are complaining. IT is under constant pressure to maintain performance of applications the workforce depends on. So, where do you start? According to Forrester, the teams on the frontline monitoring employee experience within an enterprise include:

• IT Service Desk (on the frontline)
• Email/Phone/Tickets
• Desktop Support
• Interact with end users
• Fix localized issues
• Desktop Engineering
• In charge of OS, layered products, patching
• Emerging
• Digital workplace champions

As enterprises shift to remote work operations, they need to be prepared to adjust employee experience strategies and re-think how to deliver services to employees. Some of the concerns from the teams on the frontline of employee experience include:

• Making sure employees have access to the resources needed to get work done
• Measuring the performance of applications outside the office
• Driving productivity with the right collaboration tools
• Shifting to a virtual IT Help Desk

So how do enterprises figure this out, what are the best practices? Forrester has published extensive research on employee experience and remote work to help organizations successfully make the transition.  Some best practices every enterprise can follow include:

• Deploy a digital experience monitoring solution
• Consider both active and passive monitoring as they go hand-in-hand
• Simulate a day in the life of a digital user as closely as possible
• Network monitoring is crucial

In upcoming weeks, we’ll share how leading organizations like TMNA Services solved many of the challenges discussed in today’s post using Catchpoint’s Employee Experience Monitoring Solution.

Watch a playback of our recent webcast on “Managing Remote Employee Experience Featuring Insights from Forrester” here.