How to Monitor the Digital Experience of Remote Employees

Working from home has many benefits for employees, including lack of commute time, stress, which then leads to happier employees. However, as more organizations adopt remote working practices, there are also new challenges to manage. Remote employees don’t have the same access to the Internet and applications they did when they were working in the office. This means that remote workers will need more support to ensure that they have the same digital experience they did when they were working from the office. As a result, organizations need a way to monitor their team’s digital experience at all times.

What Is Remote Worker Network Monitoring?

Remote employees use their laptop or desktops to access critical digital resources, software, and data that may not be available to them in their home office. This can include everything from collaboration tools to HR data, sales information, and more. Remote worker network monitoring involves software that actively verifies remote users’ network and application performance. Such a solution will enable IT organizations to identify potential issues before they become major problems for remote employees, saving time and resources in the long run.

Why It’s Important to Continuously Monitor Your Remote Employees’ Digital Experience

Remote working network monitoring is critical to ensure that your remote employees have enough Internet speed, good Wi-Fi signal, and computer resources to complete their tasks. Such activities can’t be done when problems occur, or once every five or ten minutes. It rather needs to happen at all times. By continuously monitoring remote employees’ digital experience, IT teams identify performance degradation problems as soon as they occur, sometimes even proactively thanks to trend analysis. Continuous monitoring empowers the IT team to resolve support tickets as soon as they are open, and recommend the appropriate next steps to correct the issue. This is not possible without continuously acquiring data from the remote user’s device.

How To Continuously Monitor The Digital Experience of Your Remote Employees

To continuously monitor the digital experience of remote employees the IT team has to install a lightweight software client on the employees’ systems. This small client acquires diagnostic data and other performance information that is transmitted to a central controller where the IT dashboard runs. The types of resources that need to be monitored will vary according to an organization’s IT architecture and applications that remote employees need to access. Let’s take a look at a few examples of what need to be analyzed when monitoring the digital experience of remote employees:

  • Remote Access – If your organization uses virtual private networks (VPN) to grant remote employees secure access to the corporate network, the remote worker network monitoring software can track the performance of these software programs. This allows IT to see when the remote employees experience any issues connecting to the VPN server or experience degraded performance.
  • SaaS and Custom Applications – Remote worker network monitoring software can also monitor the digital experience of SaaS and on-premise applications, without interjecting employees’ own traffic for privacy, confidentiality, and trust. This is possible thanks to running active tests independently from employees’ activities to determine HTTPS response and DNS resolution time. 
  • Video Conferencing Services – Finally, remote worker network monitoring software can track the performance of cloud video conference services such as Zoom and Teams, or on-prem/hybrid solutions offered by Avaya, Nice, and other vendors.

Benefits of Remote Worker Network Monitoring

By constantly monitoring the digital experience of remote employees, organizations are able to:

  • Identify potential issues – Remote worked network monitoring software enables IT teams to identify potential issues before they may be affecting remote employees. This includes everything from poor Internet connectivity, to device issues, such as low memory or CPU. If a remote employee is experiencing an issue, remote working monitoring software can help identify the cause and notify the employee of steps that can be taken to resolve the problem such as call the ISP or replace the laptop.
  • Provide 5-star support to remote employees – Remote worker network monitoring software improves the quality and reactiveness of the tech support team. It can also be used to track the frequency and urgency of network incidents to identify potential trends and issues within a remote users’ population (e.g. low Internet speed in certain geographic areas or within a certain group of ISP).
  • Improve the productivity of remote employees and the IT team – Finally, remote worker network monitoring software enables tech support to collect troubleshooting information without having to interrupt the remote employee’s work, which also translates in less time spent by the tech support to get that data. This is also referred to as Zero Touch Support.

Conclusion

Remote worker network monitoring is a critical component of an organization’s digital experience management strategy. It allows your IT team to identify issues before they become major problems and provide the support your remote employees need to get back on track, ensuring that they are as productive and successful as their colleagues in the office. That being said, it’s important to choose the right solution for your organization. NetBeez is a Digital Experience Monitoring platform that enables IT teams to easily support remote users by quickly troubleshooting Internet and SaaS outages as well as issues with on-prem and remote networks.

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