The Airline Industry Meltdown Proves The Business Case For Digital Employee Experience

“Fasten your seatbelts. We’re experiencing some DEX turbulence.”

As I write this, I’m midway over the Atlantic on my manner again from visiting purchasers in Barcelona, Spain, the place I’ve spent the final two days sharing my analysis on digital worker expertise (DEX).

The DEX market continues to be crimson scorching, with almost one-third of choice makers indicating they’ll be investing in end-user expertise administration (EUEM) over the next 12 months. However with a possible recession on the best way, clients and distributors are more and more asking me easy methods to remodel DEX from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have.” The reply lies in connecting DEX to buyer outcomes.

DEX: A Hidden Driver Of Buyer-Obsession?

For years, Forrester’s information has proven a robust hyperlink between worker engagement and buyer outcomes. As our Employee Experience Index exhibits, engaged workers usually tend to:

• Agree that their firm is customer-obsessed
• Suggest their firm’s services to potential clients

As I write this submit, I’ve simply caught the information of the current Notice To Air Missions (NOTAMs) computer outage that impacted the airline trade this morning in the USA. NOTAM is a necessary communication system that notifies key airline personnel of impactful occasions, resembling hazards, procedural updates, facility adjustments, and extra. The FAA primarily makes use of the system to inform personnel rapidly when different types of communication aren’t accessible. With out NOTAM, planes can’t take off. Whereas the system is now again on-line, the outage resulted in 1000’s of delays and cancellations that left clients stranded for the second time in as little as a number of weeks. Bear in mind Southwest?

Over the vacation season, points with legacy infrastructure brought on Southwest Airways to cancel roughly 16,000 flights. Commenting on the basis explanation for the cancellations, Captain Casey Murray, President Of The Southwest Pilots Affiliation said “It’s telephones, it’s computer systems, it’s processing energy, it’s the packages used to attach us to airplanes – that’s the place the issue lies, and it’s systemic all through the entire airline.” In different phrases, the cancellations had been the results of an outdated digital worker expertise.

Poor DEX = Poor Buyer Expertise And Unfavorable Enterprise Outcomes

Whereas challenges like technical debt and cybersecurity underscore each NOTAM and Southwest, poor digital worker expertise clearly performed some function. For the FAA, it was actually a pc outage, one thing an EUEM instrument would have visibility over. Within the case of Southwest Airways, it was outdated worker scheduling instruments and units. In the end, poor efficiency and instability of the underlying computing surroundings brought on outages and delays that negatively impacted buyer expertise. The influence on Southwest’ enterprise was excessive:

• A right away 7% inventory worth decline through the outage
• A $400-425 million income hit in This fall, in line with the company

May DEX Monitoring Have Prevented It All? Not Probably…However It Would Have Helped

In each circumstances, there are bigger problems with technical debt at play that may take time to unravel and modernize. Nonetheless, expertise monitoring instruments might have lowered the chance of an outage by making certain that one space of dependence – the endpoints working these methods – didn’t turn out to be a weak spot. With this use case in thoughts, it’s seemingly we’ll begin to see DEX enjoying in use circumstances like shared units and kiosks to:

• Monitor the well being of those endpoints
• Proactively enhance the expertise earlier than points come up
• Rapidly remediate occasions sooner after they do occur
• Most significantly, restrict influence on clients

The hyperlink between customer-obsession and digital worker expertise is more and more clear. In case your group is actually customer-obsessed, it should set a robust DEX basis. If you wish to be taught extra about how enterprises are bettering DEX of their organizations, schedule an inquiry with me at inquiry@forrester.com