Partner POV | Changing the future of work with digital employee experience solutions

This article was written by Marshall Anne Busbee, Director of Product Marketing for VMware End-User Computing (EUC), with more than 5 years of experience specializing in mobility and end user productivity.

VMware announced several new capabilities for Workspace ONE digital employee experience (DEX) solution, continuing their commitment to create an integrated, holistic offering that increases productivity and provides for faster issue remediation and higher employee engagement. Digital employee experience is a key pillar of VMware's Anywhere Workspace platform that helps organizations to successfully enable hybrid work and empower their frontline workforces. Now, with general availability of DEX for Horizon, DEX for third-party managed devices, and guided root cause analysis — plus planned ITSM Connector enhancements for ServiceNow — customers can solve their employee experience challenges in a unified way, with the flexibility to grow with their use cases.  

The top 3 digital employee experience challenges for today's businesses 

Investing in DEX is necessary for organizations to ensure highly engaged and productive employees. But there are three challenges from a digital experience perspective that are impacting organizations in today's environment:  

1. IT teams can't operate in a proactive way. They lack visibility into the issues impacting employee experiences and are busy responding to the noisiest escalation as they help resolve inbound tickets. They are being asked to do more, with less resources — and this isn't possible the way things are today.
2. Service desks are not empowered. Although helpdesk staff are often the first line of communication with employees, they don't have visibility into experience telemetry and insights, or remote support tools, which would help them solve issues more quickly. This means they're taking too long to solve tickets and need to escalate to IT too often.
3. Employees are less productive because of IT issues. Due to technology disruptions and spending time troubleshooting issues that IT might already be aware of, workers waste valuable time. When they do open tickets, employees lack confidence that IT will resolve their issues quickly and efficiently, which results in "silent suffering."

To help businesses solve these challenges, a comprehensive DEX solution is required. VMware's approach to DEX is unique. VMware focuses on measuring employee experiences, analyzing experiences, and providing AI-driven insights to IT teams about improving the experience. In addition, VMware empowers organizations with tools to automate remediation of experience-impacting issues and provide continuous delivery of improved experiences to employees. This closed loop allows IT teams to become more proactive and efficient, while empowering all employees to do their best work.  

Also, to help IT successfully "shift left," we must expand the visibility of experience-related insights and data to service desk staff. They are often the first line of communication with other employees who need technical assistance. If we can empower them to solve more issues at scale, this will decrease the number of escalations to IT, freeing IT architects and admins to focus on scaling for growth and building innovative solutions.  

To make VMware's Anywhere Workspace a reality for all organizations, our teams have been focused on how we unify experience management, extending the same principles of experience delivery, measurement, analysis, and remediation to all endpoint types and use cases. Employees don't expect different experiences depending on the device they are working on, so IT shouldn't manage their experiences in a siloed way.  

How VMware Workspace ONE updates meet today's DEX challenges 

Let's explore each of these feature announcements in more detail.  

DEX for Horizon

Experience management for our customer's Horizon environments is increasingly becoming top of mind. Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, Hub services, and Assist for Horizon are available for customers today, allowing them to deliver employee lifecycle services, communications, and provide remote support capability. To complete the experience monitoring solution for Horizon customers, DEEM (digital employee experience management) is now generally available for Horizon. DEEM for Horizon allows admins to view an experience score encompassing logon duration, VDI performance, and more. Now, with Freestyle Orchestrator, customers can automatically trigger alerts if the experience score drops below a certain threshold.    

DEX for third-party managed devices

All components of VMware's DEX solution are now available for any Windows device, whether or not it is managed by Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM). Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, Hub services, and Assist remote support have been supported on unmanaged devices for some time. But now, IT teams can measure and analyze experience with DEEM on these Windows devices, as well as remediate issues leveraging a broad set of scripts and sensors available in the Workspace ONE Marketplace. We have seen great success with this approach so far. Greenfield customers can pilot hundreds of devices in one week, immediately gaining valuable insights that allow them to remediate experience issues they weren't even aware of.  

Guided RCA general availability

Guided root cause analysis, now generally available, uses AI to identify the likely root cause of an issue with an associated confidence score. This scales up IT admin productivity by reducing the time and effort spent on data analysis for troubleshooting and allowing them to focus on choosing the appropriate remediation action. Combining guided RCA with AI-powered insights and Freestyle Orchestrator creates the new AI-powered stack admins will use to monitor, problem solve, and remediate with greater efficiency than ever before. 

ITSM Connector enhancements

VMware is planning updates to the ITSM Connector for ServiceNow to provide IT helpdesks with more insights and remediation action options within the ServiceNow incident. By providing the experience score for the user within the ticket, the helpdesk has more context to be able to proactively solve additional issues that could impact employee experience in the future. To solve issues, service desk technicians can launch an Assist session, take an expanded set of Workspace ONE UEM actions, or invoke pre-defined Freestyle Orchestrator workflows. IT admins can use these workflows to automate common remediation steps, without requiring helpdesk knowledge or run books.  

Workspace ONE product enhancements for even better DEX and ROI

This continued innovation and solution enhancement results in expanded opportunities for demonstrable ROI within all organizations, including frontline, manufacturing, and public sector. Here are three use cases and details on how Workspace ONE is improving DEX for each.  

Frontline use case for Workspace ONE

Organizations with frontline workforces are able to leverage frontline solution dashboards to monitor shared device status, prevent device loss, and ensure there is no drop in performance of mission critical applications. Every year, device theft results in millions of dollars of device replacement costs. This problem can now be avoided with DEX dashboards to monitor device checkout status and location, and then alert store managers when devices haven't been returned after a shift. For many retail organizations, point of sale has shifted to become a mobile function within a custom app. Latency or downtime of a checkout function needs to be identified immediately to minimize revenue loss. With user flow monitoring in custom apps, IT can set up alerts and preventative actions to ensure the issue is recognized and remediated.  

Manufacturing use case for Workspace ONE

A manufacturing organization combined their Workspace ONE Modern Management deployment with the DEX solution, allowing them to gain insights into a pervasive device crash issue, validate their assumptions about root cause, and remediate at scale with Freestyle Orchestrator. By removing manual troubleshooting efforts, the organization saved hundreds of engineering hours for a single issue. 

Public sector use case for Workspace ONE

A public services organization runs their business on smartphones. With an integrated approach provided by Workspace ONE, they give their IT and service desk teams visibility into issues impacting employee productivity, simplified troubleshooting, and automated remediation. This empowers their service desk to improve SLA, allowing IT to work on other issues.  

Learn more about VMware DEX solutions

With these product enhancements, we are reinforcing our investment to provide a comprehensive, scalable digital employee experience solution that helps organizations shift to a data-driven, proactive IT approach. We are thrilled to see the success of our solution in several different industries and use cases, resulting in real ROI. VMware's unified DEX solution offers many opportunities for organizations to address the productivity and efficiency challenges faced by IT, employees, and the service desk in this age of hybrid work — no matter where they are in their journey to re-think all employee digital experiences.