Implementing a Digital Experience Platform to Improve Employee Experience

As you know, digital experience platforms (DXP) are by no means a new idea. They’ve been in use for a while and are a valuable tool for improving customer engagement and increasing business. What is new, however, is the idea of using a digital experience platform as part of an employee experience transformation initiative.

It makes perfect sense given the fact that DXPs are an ideal foundation for complex technological landscapes, but the idea bears further discussion because it’s not a simple matter of just implementing a typical DXP and calling it a day. While there are certainly similarities between the customer and employee experiences, there are some important differences that need to be understood as well.

For example, in order for a digital experience platform to be successful at improving the employee experience, it would be expected to increase productivity, reduce frustration, mimic the levels of consumer-like simplicity employees are accustomed to, plus help attract and retain top talent -- and that’s before factoring in the capabilities the platform needs to help IT meet its own goals and objectives.

Unfortunately, many of the available digital experience platforms aren’t designed to deliver the holistic vision of the employee experience that your organization is looking for. Most are either intended to be used for customer experience purposes or they’re built around the creation of an employee portal or intranet. Perfectly valid initiatives, but only a small part of the larger transformation you’re trying to create.

Thankfully, there are digital experience platforms that have the employee-specific features and functionality you need to create an employee experience that’s ready for the future of work. Here are the key features and functionality you should look for:

1. Support the entire employee journey

The platform you choose should be able to serve as the center of gravity for your entire employee experience strategy, supporting all the major touch points throughout the employee journey.

2. Personalized & Contextual Experiences

An open platform that enables scalable development of a personalized, targeted and contextual user experience delivered across all devices and channels.

3. Supports & Promotes Seamless Integration

Includes pre-packed integrations that accelerate time to value and an open platform that enables extensibility to build and customize integrations as needed. Integrations should allow for consuming and exposing data services from business applications (ERP, HCM, Office productivity, CRM, etc.).

4. Open & Extensible Platform

Flexibility to provide rapid deployment through low-code or no-code capabilities or completely customize based on organizational needs. Ability to support high-scale, agile development among developers with various skills.

5. Modernize Legacy Systems

Ability to modernize the user experience of legacy systems with consumer-grade web and mobile front ends, increasing the ROI of back end systems that meet business needs but lack a modern user interface .

6. Multi-Channel Delivery

Enables the delivery of experiences, information and tasks on-demand, wherever employees are, whether on the front lines, remote, deskless, or in the office.

7. Future-Proof Open Platform

Future proof the employee digital experience with an open platform that meets enterprise-level authentication and security requirements while enabling high-scale agile development, including plug-and-play functionality of pointed enterprise applications, without requiring organizational change management at scale.

8. Orchestration & Presentation Layer

Delivers an employee experience layer that orchestrates employee-facing applications into a single interaction layer and insulates workers from the complexity of the enterprise system topography.

9. Applied AI

Makes use of digital assistants, natural language processing, machine learning, and other AI technologies that leverage graph technology or profile data to deliver intelligent and engaging experiences across interfaces (desktop, conversational, mobile, web, etc.).

For more information, check out part 1 of our series, "Digital Workplace Transformation: Understanding -- and Improving -- the Impact on the Employee Experience"

You can also see first-hand what kind of impact a truly employee-centric digital experience platform can have. Check out how Liberty Mutual Insurance transformed their Intranet into an intelligent employee experience.