Why We Built a Better Employee Experience Solution

For the past 10 years, we at Catchpoint have seen that organizations that effectively manage end-user experience see improvements in customer experience, employee productivity, and operational efficiency.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, IBM CIO Fletcher Previn talks about the increasingly high expectations that employees have for their digital services. “New employees expect that the IT services they use at work will be as good as or better than the technology they use at home,” Previn said. “To be competitive and attract talent, we have to create an environment where talented engineers want to work.”

Too often, these expectations are not met. We’ve all been there; you have a critical customer meeting, or key departmental project, or maybe a presentation to your executives. There are some last-minute changes (aren’t there always?) and you’re scrambling to get it done. And then one of the tools you need stops working right when you need it most when you have a deadline and people are waiting.

Of course, the truth is these kinds of blips happen all the time. Your IT help desk receives emails and tickets about issues they know nothing about. “Webmail is slow! Help me! Fix it.” Not knowing what, where, or why outages are happening creates longer mean time to repair, frustrates employees, and kills productivity.

To get a handle on just how common these problems are, we conducted a study through SurveyMonkey of how individuals experienced the SaaS applications they use every day.

The need to understand employees’ experiences of the technology they use (and triangulate where problems are occurring) is why we built a solution specifically to help companies take back control and oversight of those experiences.

It’s critical that companies have this oversight. In their 2017 State of SaaS Performance report, Tech Target found that 26.7% of SaaS providers had outages and performance degradations that violated the terms of their SLAs with customers. This means that most companies should collect some form of compensation from approximately one-quarter of their SaaS vendors. Are you?

Survey results

The not-so-surprising surprise of the survey is that 100% of people surveyed reported they’d experienced outages to their SaaS applications in the last month. Almost two-thirds of people (65.9%) said the outages happened with apps critical to their jobs. 51.5% had outages in multiple apps, 25.9% had outages in more than six apps, and 1 in 10 (10.1%) had outages in more than 10 of their business-critical SaaS apps.

64.9% of respondents said their outages were over 30 minutes, and when their SaaS apps are down, people are only 54% productive. With a median of three outages a month, at 30 minutes each, with 50% productivity during those times, that’s nine hours of productivity lost per employee per year, over a full day, just from ‘standard’ outages due to normal operations.

When things go wrong, only half of our respondents (52.2%) contacted their central IT team. 13.1% of people reached out to the SaaS vendor directly, and 11.1% researched on the web via sites like downdetector.com. In one of the more surprising results, we found that 40.7% of people essentially did nothing when they experienced these problems.

When problems occur, 63.6% of people waited over 30 minutes for information on the outage, and 39.7% waited over an hour. That’s potentially why so many people do nothing when the outages occur – it seems outages typically resolve themselves quicker than information about those outages is released.

These outages significantly impact employees. 84.1% of people said there was a prolonged effect on their mood due to SaaS outages, and 1 in 6 people (16.84%) said it had a severe negative effect on their mood. 81.8% said it affected the quality of their work, and 39.4% said the negative impact on their works was significant.

Lastly, 11.5% of people blamed their internal teams for the SaaS outage, a third (33.7%) blamed the SaaS vendor, but 42.4% of people never understood who was at fault for the outage.

It’s clear that these common outages and performance degradations affect all employees, and they have a lasting, negative impact on productivity and employee satisfaction. Most importantly, people are largely in the dark about what’s happening. They don’t know what went wrong, they don’t know why it went wrong, they don’t know where to go to resolve these issues, and far too many people simply decide to wait it out.

Employee experience monitoring is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have. It’s about making sure we are monitoring and measuring the right things, providing meaningful telemetry that is actionable.

It’s no longer about helpdesk metrics like the number of tickets opened, ticket closure rate, some basic availability test… it’s about this holistic approach that looks at the entire workforce, at the entire suite of applications used, and having contextual information (what else is on that device? Who else is having a problem?) to help triangulate information as quickly as possible and restore services.

We knew some of these things already; that’s why we expanded our offerings for monitoring digital employee experiences, including our recently launched Endpoint Monitoring. But this data helps illustrate the depth of the problem.

At Catchpoint, we provide a SaaS platform and as a tech company, we utilize many SaaS services every day. So we understand it from both a provider and consumer perspective.

And since we live it, we thought it would be valuable to hear from those who built the Endpoint Monitoring Solution. We interviewed several people who live and breathe the SaaS world every day, on what problems they face and why they are excited to build and bring to market Endpoint Monitoring. Here are the highlights: