Digital employee experience (DEX) software measures how well each employee's laptop and applications perform for that employee, so the IT team can find and fix problems before anyone raises a ticket. It is also called DEX management or end-user experience management.
DEX depends on a small program installed on every laptop, called an endpoint agent. The agent records how long the laptop takes to start, which applications crash or freeze, how often the Wi-Fi drops, how full the disk is, and how healthy the battery is. It sends these measurements to the DEX software. Some products also show the employee a short question now and then, such as "How satisfied are you with your laptop this week?" The software combines all this into a score for each laptop and for the whole company.
Take, for example, an engineering services firm in Thiruvananthapuram with 4,000 laptops. On a Tuesday morning, DEX shows that 600 laptops now take six minutes to start, against the usual ninety seconds. All 600 received a new version of the VPN app the night before. Nobody has raised a ticket yet, although many employees have noticed. The IT team pauses the update through unified endpoint management (UEM), and asks the VPN's maker for a fix. On 80 other laptops, the slow start is caused by a nearly full disk. For those, DEX runs a clean-up script by itself. It also opens one ticket in the IT service management (ITSM) software, with the evidence attached, so that the problem is on record.
The same data helps with planning. DEX finds 120 laptops whose batteries hold less than 60% of their original charge. IT replaces those batteries before they fail. It can also see which old laptops are too slow for the applications staff now use.
The IT department used to learn about a problem from a ticket. With DEX, the laptop reports the problem first. The next step is already on sale: the same agent fixing the problem itself, without a person. DEX also measures virtual desktops, where the delay between a key press and the screen's response matters most.
DEX should measure the laptop, not watch the employee. A DEX agent records which applications run and how they perform, but it should not record what the employee types or reads. Companies tell their staff what is collected, and why.
How is DEX different from infrastructure monitoring? Infrastructure monitoring watches the company's servers and networks. DEX watches the devices that employees use every day.