What is digital employee experience? The complete guide

An efficient workplace is like a bustling city. Just as you have to navigate city streets to reach your destinations, in a workplace, you maneuver between meetings, gather information from colleagues, and manage complex projects. And if a city has a well-designed transit system with clear signage, user-friendly apps, and reliable routes, the journey through it is smooth and efficient. Similarly, a positive digital employee experience provides the right tools and systems, ensuring smooth and efficient workflow.

DEX is the digital layer of the overall employee experience (EX). It encompasses all the technology, tools, and platforms employees use daily, from communication platforms to HR systems. Just like a well-designed city infrastructure, a good DEX makes work flow naturally.

In this guide, we’ll break down the key components and benefits of a well-designed DEX, provide examples of positive DEX, and explain how to implement a DEX strategy. Read on to discover all a top-notch DEX strategy has to offer.

More in this guide:

• Digital employee experience components
• Benefits of a strong digital employee experience
• Digital employee experience examples
• Tips for implementing a winning DEX strategy
• Frequently asked questions
• Improve your DEX with top-tier employee service

Digital employee experience components

DEX is about the big picture of how employees interact with the digital tools they use at work—like portals, mobile apps, or forums—and how that translates to a smooth workflow. To position a DEX strategy for success, it should focus on people, processes, and technology—and the best way to do that is to adopt a DEX solution like Zendesk.

You need the right teams to lead employee experience management, and you need to choose tools that put your people first because they’re intuitive and easy to use. Then, you need to ensure that the proper workflows and processes are in place to manage the EX. Lastly, you need the right tech stack to support your solution.

Six key components break down the digital employee experience further:

• UI and UX: How easy the tools are to use
• Scalability: How well the tools scale with your business
• Integration: How well the tools integrate with other systems
• Personalization: How the tools help you meet individual employee needs
• Performance: How well the tool helps with quality assurance (QA) and monitoring employee performance
• Configurability: How you can customize systems to meet the specific needs of your organization

A DEX solution that includes all of these components can help revolutionize your organization’s approach to employee service and ensure that your team is supported, empowered, and satisfied.

Benefits of a strong digital employee experience

The benefits of a great digital employee experience strategy are nearly endless when you consider that DEX tools can grow and evolve with your business as you scale. These are the top five benefits that you can expect.

Increased productivity

A strong DEX enables your people to navigate their daily tasks without procedural headaches. They can ask questions and get answers faster, often without ever escalating a query to your human support team. And when they do need to engage a support agent, that person gets access to all the contextual information they need to provide a quick, personalized answer.

Zendesk increases employee productivity with AI agents that deliver generative replies to inbound queries. These advanced chatbots respond to questions and comprehensively answer them with relevant information from a knowledge base or other internal source. Plus, they can detect the source language and intent and analyze sentiment for a clear picture of the employee’s needs.

Seamless collaboration

A DEX tool allows team members to collaborate in one place—whether in the office or remote. A unified, omnichannel workspace helps disseminate useful information across teams and departments so support agents can resolve tickets faster.

Collaboration is a key component of employee training through coaching and knowledge sharing. Agents can collaborate with peers or managers without leaving a support conversation, chatting on the side to discuss tips or outcomes. And for an all-hands-on-deck approach, agents can invite other teams directly into messaging conversations for faster resolutions.

Streamlined employee onboarding

DEX tools can help facilitate employee onboarding and offboarding for both HR and IT teams. Cross-departmental collaboration helps complete time-sensitive tasks quickly so employees can ramp up quickly.

Hiring managers also benefit from increased process visibility. They get access to new hire information to help plan and allocate resources and insights from reports to spot gaps or inefficiencies in the onboarding or offboarding process. Then, they can make data-backed decisions to improve employee service.

Lower operational costs

By helping people help themselves, businesses can save big on operational costs. AI can enable organizations to streamline operations with reporting that includes actionable suggestions for improvements. Then, leaders can make fast internal changes to meet teams’ evolving needs.

With HR teams seeing pressure to ramp up productivity and keep costs low, businesses need ways to reduce inbound ticket loads. Self-service knowledge bases with federated and semantic search help employees find exactly what they need. If that’s not available, AI can expedite the creation of a new article, spot potential content gaps, or flag outdated information.

Reduced operational silos

A complex, frustrating tech stack is a speed bump that can derail productivity. Instead, digital employee experience software, like Zendesk, can take advantage of your existing systems out of the box. It integrates seamlessly with different tools to unify systems across the entire company.

Unifying a disparate tech stack reduces hurdles for decision-making and helps hypercharge productivity. With a tool like Zendesk, you can even automate across systems with pre-built integrations. Zendesk Marketplace has over 1,500 no-code integrations with leading CRM software, social media, and more to bring your teams together wherever and however they work.

Digital employee experience examples

Great digital employee experiences empower your workforce and eliminate everyday headaches from tech problems or process bottlenecks. Here are some examples of DEX making a difference:

• Knowledge base and employee self-service portal: Employees can find answers easily and independently, reducing frustration with waiting for help and giving employees more control over their work experience.
• Automated onboarding: New hires get a frictionless welcome with pre-configured laptops, access to an online portal with clear instructions and training videos, and a chatbot that can answer questions or direct them to new information—all accessible on their first day.
• Real-time performance feedback: Employees can track their goals and receive recognition for achievements, and managers can access insights to spot coaching opportunities, all within a centralized software.
• Single sign-on: Team members breeze through tasks with a single sign-on for all work applications, avoiding the need to manage multiple passwords.
• HR help desk: Employees can engage with an AI-powered chatbot to inquire about HR policies, benefits, and more or submit tickets across different communication channels.
• IT help desk: Administrators can provide proactive support with self-service portals, including troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and tutorials, while employees can submit tickets through multiple channels to access support.
• Employee feedback tools: Employees can easily share thoughts and suggestions on anything from company culture to workflow improvements, helping employees feel heard.

Since the best DEX strategies are fluid and tailored to your organizational needs, the components you desire from a solution might vary. You simply need a tool that can support your operational goals, help you scale, and leverage AI for the most intuitive and meaningful insights.

Tips for implementing a winning DEX strategy

Now that we’ve explored a few DEX examples, let’s dive into actionable strategies. Here are some practical tips to help implement a successful DEX and empower your workforce through technology.

1. Leverage AI to streamline workflows

AI is a foundational element in any modern DEX strategy. With AI, businesses can automate repetitive tasks like data entry and reporting. This helps free up employees’ time for more strategic work and reduces frustration from tedious processes.

AI-powered intelligent triage automatically directs tasks to the most qualified individuals. Intelligent triage uses intent, language detection, and sentiment analysis to classify inbound employee tickets. Then, internal support teams can power their workflows based on these insights.

2. Meet employees on the channels where they already are

For the best digital employee experience, businesses need to ensure employees can get the help they need when needed. Your employees are already communicating over business channels like Slack or Microsoft Teams—with Zendesk, you can meet them there.

Omnichannel support enables messaging across web, mobile, and business productivity channels to ensure no ticket goes unseen. Then, in the unified Agent Workspace, internal support teams can access tickets in one place and take advantage of case management tools like ticket fields, forms, tags, automations, suggested macros, and much more.

3. Personalize the EX

Personalization is just as important with internal support as with traditional customer service. With some legacy systems, HR service teams must swivel between multiple interfaces to get the full context to help them with an employee ticket. But with Zendesk, all that context is in one place because it integrates with your legacy systems to make life easier and more efficient for the HR teams.

Businesses focusing on personalization as an element of their DEX use tools like Zendesk to ensure IT and HR teams can access key employee context. This helps agents provide tailored guidance on a case-by-case basis while creating conversational experiences that boost employee engagement.

4. Help employees help themselves

One of the easiest ways to improve the employee experience is to empower your people to find answers independently. This improves operational efficiency and reduces back-and-forth requests or frequently asked questions.

AI-powered self-service from Zendesk supercharges employees’ ability to find information. Features like federated search enable employees to find help center content on external web pages. In contrast, semantic search helps them find the right internal knowledge base article based on their request. Generative AI accelerates the creation of help center articles for unanswered questions.

5. Offer 24/7 service with AI agents

Intelligent support around the clock can help transform a DEX solution from helpful to truly game-changing. Offering service and support 24/7 helps cater to employees in international time zones or helps employees find answers when someone is out of the office. Zendesk accomplishes this with AI agents, which are AI-powered advanced bots that can solve employee service requests by integrating with your backend systems.

Zendesk AI agents come with pre-trained intents, giving businesses out-of-the-box functionality to address different support requests. The bots can also deliver generative replies by connecting with your existing knowledge base and using that information to answer queries.

6. Protect sensitive employee data

Your people want to know that their personal information isn’t an afterthought in your digital EX strategy. Zendesk brings peace of mind with enterprise-grade privacy and security features that allow administrators to manage permissions for multiple departments and grant access to tickets based on different criteria.

Cyber attacks outside the company, like phishing attacks, are also a concern when creating a digital strategy. With a secure tool like Zendesk, businesses can fight cyber attacks with two-factor authentication for IT specialists and employees while keeping their data safe via advanced encryption keys.

7. Continually improve your process

The best DEX initiatives constantly evolve—but that doesn’t mean you’ll need to continually upgrade your software to adapt. The best tools for a strong employee service approach integrate QA tools and data analysis to improve an automatic part of operations.

AI-driven quality assurance software, like Zendesk QA, can monitor 100 percent of interactions across AI and human conversations, giving a real-time score for every conversation on crucial metrics like tone, understanding, sentiment, and language. Managers can use those scores to spotlight opportunities for improvement and create plans to achieve it.

8. Gather employee feedback

Your people are your best resource for determining the success of your DEX initiatives. Employee feedback unveils hidden challenges, like if a core collaboration tool is clunky and hinders teamwork. By seeking out and listening to these concerns, you can prioritize fixes and upgrades, directly addressing frustrations and enhancing the DEX.

In addition to manually collecting feedback, businesses can use AI to dig deeper. Sentiment analysis of employee queries and conversations can highlight common frustrations or areas of satisfaction, providing valuable insights at scale.

Frequently asked questions

Improve your DEX with top-tier employee service

By prioritizing a positive DEX, business leaders can clear the gridlock of clunky internal customer service and empower their people to navigate the complexities of their workday easily. With better systems to manage help desk traffic, teams can collaborate in real time and resolve tickets faster. All this fosters productivity and satisfaction for a more tuned-in and satisfied team.

Craft a strong, AI-driven digital employee experience that helps your people help themselves with Zendesk for employee service.