Human experience – the one measurement your business can’t do without

Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash

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According to recent research, 90% of people in financial services now want to work from home at least one day a week. So it’s no surprise that the same research shows 69% of companies in the sector have invested in new or updated technology to enable digital transformation since lockdown began.

This seismic shift towards hybrid working, and with it the accelerating creation of digital ecosystems, carries significant challenges. Most businesses have IT-level monitoring in place to analyse the technical performance of their technology. But far fewer understand the critical need to quantify the human experience of using it – and the organisational level impact it can have.

Take an average working day. Most employees in financial services will need access to multiple systems, services and applications, all running in tandem, to help them do their job and (especially when working remotely) interact with the company. If those systems are running slowly, if access is difficult, or if information isn’t available when it’s needed, the employee can feel frustrated, angry, disconnected and demotivated. And that’s never good news for your business.

It can mean poor productivity (and profitability). Wasted time. Falling customer service standards. Damage to your reputation and revenue. Problems with equality between those employees who have access to good digital services and those who don’t.

With so much at stake, how can you measure exactly how your employees are feeling?

The traditional answer has been the humble survey. And there’s still something to be said for their ability to record how someone is thinking or feeling at a specific moment in time. But a survey isn’t particularly accurate or reliable. It isn’t always-on. It certainly doesn’t give you actionable insight.

You might think an alternative option lies with your IT department. But if someone’s digital world isn’t working well, and they’re having a bad day but haven’t raised a ticket, how can you know there’s a problem? Information will be anecdotal at best.

The other drawback of both approaches is their lack of scalability. Until last year, even for financial services organisations managing thousands of staff, it was relatively easy to monitor how people and digital systems were interacting throughout their offices.

Now, however, things have changed fundamentally. With everyone working from home, those same businesses have to manage digital services across tens of thousands of premises, and maintain a good grasp on their employees’ experience of those services. To do that, there’s really only one solution: automated Digital Business Analytics which report on the human experience.

In the case of Actual Experience, our Digital Business Analytics is based on more than a decade of research into the complex links between digital systems and their human users – and the impact they can have on the top-line performance of a business.

Using that research, we’ve created an algorithm that identifies exactly how your employees are feeling about the systems they’re using, how that’s impacting their performance, and what it means for you as a business, this is the human experience of your business. More than that, it gives you accurate, actionable guidance on what you need to do to improve the human experience and achieve better outcomes for your organisation.

In a way that could never be achieved by a survey, or any other method, our analytics are constantly measuring and monitoring in the background, giving you real-world data against key people and business metrics:

• Wellbeing – how are poor digital services impacting your employees’ wellbeing?
• Equality – which of your employees are at a disadvantage, in comparison with their peers because of poor digital services?
• Environment – what is the environmental saving you can make, if employees did not have to commute or travel for business?
• Employee experience – what is the total wasted employee time?
• Revenue – what’s the potential revenue opportunity if improvements are continuously made?
• Operational efficiency – how much are you paying employees to stop, slow down or wait due to poorly performing systems?
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Armed with this information, you can make the necessary fixes, upgrades and improvements needed to increase employee satisfaction, and subsequently, performance. You

 can choose digital systems and platforms that are aligned perfectly with your business objectives. You can even fulfil your remit as an inclusive employer with plausible sustainability credentials.

So it begins with the moment-by-moment human experience of every employee, and feeds right through to your long-term business strategy. And in this increasingly fragmented working world, that end-to-end insight and continuity are invaluable assets.
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Start measuring human experience today

If you’d like to learn exactly how your digital systems are impacting the human experience of your employees, and how you can affect positive change, Actual Experience can help. You’ll find more about our business analytics tools and their benefits here.