The alchemy of product analytics in employee experience

In the relentless surge of digital transformation, the nature of the workplace is changing drastically. We are in an era where employee experience takes center stage. EX takes center stage as enterprises increasingly see the causal impact of employees on customer experience and business outcomes like revenue and profits. As enterprises harness the might of technology to enhance efficiency, the changing focus is on technology and human well-being. Along with flexibility and data-driven insights, this change in focus also presents a maze of technological overload threats to the illusive work-life balance.

Recent findings from a Gartner survey underscore issues faced by global digital workers. With the increased complexity of the modern digital work environment, almost half of them face difficulties in gaining access to crucial work-related information. There is another complication with the proliferation of software applications. Today’s knowledge workers must manage an average of eleven applications, compared to just six back in 2019. In fact, about 40% of digital workers exceed this average, while over 5% struggle to cope with a staggering twenty-six or more applications.

By leveraging product analytics internally, enterprises can gain a comprehensive understanding of various aspects, including the specific tasks being performed, the duration spent on each activity, and the overall patterns of user interaction. Enterprises can use this data to identify dropoff or user friction points, build user cohorts, measure feature adoption, map user flows, track customer conversion events, and more. This empowers enterprises with the knowledge needed to enhance productivity, streamline processes, and ensure that employees are utilizing software resources effectively.

Product Analytics as a Catalyst for Employee Experience

Adoption of analytics can become the guiding light in this fascinating setting, helping to navigate the complexity of the digital terrain. Its importance extends beyond enhancing the customer experience, as it provides valuable insights into user behavior and feedback, guiding innovation through better analysis of customer data. Now, its impact extends to the employee experience, enabling enterprisess to understand and improve the key drivers of the employee experience Through implementation, enterprises can not only increase employee satisfaction but also achieve both positive customer experience results and a positive impact on the bottom line, which is critical to overall enterprise growth.

The product analytics market is poised to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.9%, from $5.93 billion by 2021 to $16.69 billion by 2028, per a Gartner report. McKinsey's recent report also underscores the pivotal role of analytics. It highlights that companies integrating data into their operations achieve productivity rates 5% to 6% higher than their competitors. This tremendous growth highlights the benefits analytics delivers. By embracing data-driven decision-making, leaders are ushering in a new era of insight and understanding that not only elevates the employee journey but also drives broader enterprise strategies and business objectives.

Some of the key benefits of analytics that CIOs can use to elevate employee experience are mentioned below:

Minimizing technical debt:  Enterprises often find themselves running both legacy and latest versions of applications, as employees use both versions for distinct tasks. This creates challenges in change management programs as enterprises lack visibility into the usage patterns of each app and its user base. This creates technical debt. Leveraging analytics, CIOs and application owners can identify high user engagement modules within the product, enabling them to retire the corresponding legacy modules. This strategic approach leads to significant cost savings by reducing technical debt. The impact is particularly pronounced in enterprises with a dispersed and mobile workforce.

Data-driven prioritization: Analytics provides leaders with valuable insights into the daily utilization of technology by employees. This data empowers informed decision-making, shaping company strategies aligned with enterprise goals. The collected data helps in curating enhanced features of an application while facilitating faster data collection in the future. This aids in identifying areas for improvement and ensuring that employees have access to efficient and reliable digital resources.

Enhanced productivity: Integrated product analytics can reveal parts of applications or processes that pose challenges for individual users. Training gaps and errors stemming from a lack of clarity about the user journey within an application result in the loss of hours, even weeks. By gaining insights into how users navigate a process and their adherence to required steps, enterprises can provide users with contextual information and guidance. This also contributes to improving user productivity and enterprise efficiency and minimizing the impact of training gaps and errors.

Behavior analysis and UX enhancement: Analytics provide change leaders and CIOs with insights into how employees interact with internal applications and platforms. This allows for the customization of employee journeys based on their individual preferences and requirements. Analytics measures user satisfaction by analyzing feedback, usage metrics, adoption rates, and response times. According to Gallup, a workplace consulting and global research company, the current low level of workforce engagement results in a global productivity loss of $8.8 trillion. By analyzing usage patterns, companies can identify trends indicative of high or low engagement levels. This information enables the design of strategies to enhance engagement, tailor engagement, and optimize the overall employee experience.

In an era of data abundance, leveraging analytics in employee experiences is a strategic imperative. Enterprises need to tap into the unlimited potential of analytics and offer their employees customized, engaging experiences. Unleashing the full power of analytics is key to companies demonstrating that they are at the forefront of transformative change in how they attract, cultivate, and retain their most valuable asset—their employees. As we charge into 2024, the CIOs can clearly see that the need to leverage analytics to achieve an unparalleled employee experience has never been more important.

Vara Kumar Namburu

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Vara Kumar Namburu is Co-founder and CTO of Whatfix.