Overcome productivity killers in the enterprise

As an IT leader you’ve likely seen your responsibilities expand in the last few years to include significantly improving productivity and performance for employees who work across multiple locations. Forrester, in fact, has found that 60% of IT leaders are investing in employee experience to do just that.

What shape should technology investments take to address employee productivity obstacles in the “new enterprise”? Think about the following 5 technology issues that create productivity pains for employees in the moments that matter — and contribute to an uninspired workforce. 

1. Employees are forced to use inefficient IT solutions, leading them to open support tickets to resolve IT issues rather than having the autonomy to address these issues independently through self-service tools.

2. Employees are often in the dark about device issues, causing uncertainty about whether anyone is actively resolving them.

3. Employees don’t have an easy and intuitive way to order, refresh and manage technology, impacting their ability to swiftly return to productivity. It can often take hours for them to get back on track.

4. Employees feel that IT is not listening to their challenges and does not address them through continuous service improvements.

5. Employees lack trust in the available support options and lack alternatives that could assist them in getting back to work.

It’s time to move the ball forward to raise the level of employee productivity and experience. Applying accessible and scalable artificial intelligence capabilities in the workplace is a key part of the mission, fostering an always-on digital ecosystem that is available to workers anytime and anywhere.

Addressing the productivity barriers

CIOs should focus their attention on getting the most value out of modern, fully-integrated technology solutions to address these issues and provide a friction-free, productivity-boosting workplace experience.

That’s the path to solving the multiple issues related to being able to seamlessly resolve problems that impact employees’ productivity in the moments that matter. Coupling automation with self-healing capabilities, and leveraging predictive and proactive analytics with the help of AI and machine learning, provide the best option for addressing these concerns.

Imagine, for example, the value of leveraging generative AI so that users can eliminate manual intervention in IT issues, instead working via a digital assistant that automates resolutions, provides personal assistance at scale and enables agents to focus on critical issues and high-touch interactions. Employees can enjoy a consumer-like, journey-based experience, where they can be walked through resolving the issue or automatically and intuitively directed to the appropriate knowledge base resource. Or, a digital assistant can even do the job of opening a support ticket for them, or automatically dispatch a live agent, if necessary — and doing it fast. 

Equally important to that outcome is having IT stay ahead of the game. One measure of success for your IT organisation is the number of device problems solved that your employees didn’t even know they had! Advance resolution — rather than after-the-fact reaction — by harnessing the power of AI in support of proactive experience monitoring means employees are never interrupted in the first place. Also consider the value of providing real-time information about unexpected outages — keeping employees in the loop means they won’t waste time trying to reach the service desk to find out what happened and resolve the issue.

Quick resolution of issues includes getting employees the tools they need to get back to work fast when their systems or peripherals break. They need to be able to immediately start the process of getting a replacement. That process can be accelerated when the organisation has context-aware knowledge of the employee’s devices and applications, so that they can get a new, correctly configured system as soon as possible and jump right back to work. 

All this has to take into consideration the requirement that employees have a simple way to interact with the technology, wherever they are and whatever device they are using. And this has to be carried out against the backdrop of viewing employee experiences through the lens of employee sentiment, workforce perception and service metrics, with real-time insights. This aids the organisation in not just addressing an IT issue fast, but ensuring greater satisfaction in how the job is handled, too.  

How to achieve the vision

How’s all that for generating employee productivity wins? Now the question is, how do you make it all happen?

DXC has been steadily advancing the state of the employee experience and productivity with DXC UPtime™ — an AI-powered, one-stop shop for workplace services centralised and integrated across browser, mobile, desktop and Microsoft Teams channels. UPtime’s intuitive approach for easily finding and engaging with IT brings together the:

• UPtime Experience Gateway, the central place for accessing all IT workplace services — the on-ramp to new levels of employee productivity
•  UPtime Marketplace, which provides a friction-free, self-directed process for ordering IT devices, peripherals, accessories and more
• UPtime Device Management, our AI-powered capability for measuring and optimising PC performance and extending PC life, as well as providing stability and responsiveness in a compliant, secure environment, by leveraging machine-learning pattern recognition and predictability models
• UPtime Digital Assistant, a generative AI-powered assistant that understands the intent of 3+ billion phrases to help answer employees’ questions fast, and reduces the overall cost of workplace support
• UPtime Experience Analytics, which lets businesses gain a 360-degree view of the workplace, as they listen to their employees, measure their technology experiences, act on that feedback and drive continuous service improvements. 

These can be packaged together as a single solution or implemented individually based on organisations’ needs. They provide all the tools needed to create a seamless employee experience that enhances productivity as part of the resolution process. For example, contact resolution using the Digital Assistant takes an average of 3 minutes, vs. 15 minutes with a live support agent. Not only will CIOs be able to understand how fast problems are resolved using the UPtime Digital Assistant, for instance, but with UPtime Experience Analytics they will be able to assess if employees are not having an optimal experience getting those speedy results.

So much of getting the productivity picture right is contingent upon having access to a wealth of data — data to get a holistic view of employees, data for measuring their service desk experiences, data about the questions they are asking, data to inform machine learning models and drive continuous improvement. DXC can draw upon data from the 6.9M+ devices that we manage for businesses around the globe, so we are constantly learning about the kinds of issues people are having and proactively apply that knowledge in solving problems for all our customers. Our customers can benefit from the collective insights of 40 million interactions annually that DXC has with our UPtime Digital Assistant customers.  

Our solution harnesses customers’ own data, as well. At one of our large manufacturing customers, our continuously learning Digital Assistant learned 70% of unknown, company-specific phrases within 30 days — data it could apply to further feed its ability to solve employees’ problems.

There’s a virtuous cycle in embracing the UPtime approach to productivity, including an 80% average reduction in time to resolve problems as service desk tickets decrease, DXC finds. Support staff has more time to invest in getting to and solving more difficult issues that demand closer attention when they are not distracted by a multitude of problems. 

DXC has seen that customers who use UPtime can realise as much as a 70% ticket deflection rate and IT incidents drop from 2 to 1.5 per month on average. Without UPtime, when a problem does occur, employees on average can spend about 3 hours trying to resolve the incident, representing a significant monthly productivity loss to businesses. Rather than spending that time servicing customers or streamlining processes, employees’ time is spent on detecting and understanding device issues, rebooting, knowledge searches, fix-it-yourself attempts, waiting for support from help desk agents and checking for issue resolution.

In contrast it takes only 30 minutes per month on average to solve an incident with UPtime, thanks to its ability to proactively resolve an issue before impacting users, offer remedies via realtime chat and check if the issue has been resolved. In combination with other UPtime capabilities, such as improved PC performance and faster onboarding, businesses can see a total productivity gain of 15+ hours per month. Equally important, there’s a positive impact on employee satisfaction and retention when they can focus on their work rather than technology problems.

Clearly, making the right technology investments to maximise workforce productivity is a must in today’s enterprise. DXC’s goal to transform the modern workplace — largely with innovative AI capabilities —  covers this ground, empowering enterprise workers in any industry and creating personalised and meaningful AI experiences for them, while helping companies build a sustainable workplace ecosystem and reduce IT costs.

Learn more about Modern Workplace and UPtime