Mobile DEX: The Next Frontier for Front-Line Employee Experience

Mobile DEX is truly the next frontier in ensuring excellent digital experiences for your front-line employees. Whether it’s an Amazon delivery person, a nurse at the Mayo Clinic, a Hertz representative at the car rental return garage, or a field service agent at USAA, they rely on mobile devices to do their jobs. And supply chain, healthcare, car rental and insurance are hardly the only industries that provide their employees with mobile devices.

Gartner projects that businesses will spend $61.5B on mobile devices in 2024, up 1.4% from 2023, according to Gartner Market Data Book 1Q24. Gartner also projects that companies will purchase 155 million mobile devices, including phones and tablets, for their workforce in 2024.

The scary part about Mobile DEX

Digital Employee Experience Management, or DEX, is a hot topic right now. Every observability vendor touts their abilities to gather telemetry on device and application performance and usage, associate that with employee sentiment and organizational context, and then employ AI or ML techniques to proactively identify and resolve employee issues, while providing insights into better performance and changes in behavior.

Here’s the thing: most of these vendors are focused on ensuring excellent DEX for employees who use laptops, PCs, or thin-client devices. They don’t have the ability to ensure a positive Mobile DEX. With 155 million mobile devices in use, that’s a pretty sizeable blind spot. Especially since these mobile users are the point people–they’re the ones interacting directly with customers or patients or citizens. So, if IT lacks visibility into their Mobile DEX, they really have no idea of whether issues are affecting revenue, productivity, satisfaction, or even healthcare outcomes.

Mobile DEX for corporate-owned Android and iOS devices

For front-line workers and other employees who rely on mobile devices for their jobs, poor digital experience negatively affects productivity and customer service. IT is responsible for the digital experience of these employees, just as they are for employees who use laptops and PCs, but they lack visibility to proactively identify and resolve issues affecting the full range of mobile apps and devices used by the workforce.

Solving key challenges in assuring mobile digital experience

Riverbed’s Mobile DEX solution, Aternity Mobile, enables IT teams to proactively identify digital experience issues on Android and iOS mobile apps and devices and take prescriptive, targeted actions, improving employee productivity, customer service and business results. Aternity Mobile provides a comprehensive view of mobile app and device performance across Android and iOS for multiple vendors and enables IT to improve employee experience by engaging with them to get feedback and send contextual help.

Only Aternity, the digital experience solution of the Riverbed Platform for unified observability and optimization, provides a cohesive view of digital employee experience throughout their day, even as they switch between devices. Watch this video to see how it works:

Riverbed fills the Mobile DEX gap

Mobile DEX is a gap that most management solutions don’t address. Enterprise Mobility Management solutions don’t provide enough visibility into actual app and device performance. They can tell which mobile apps have been deployed to mobile devices, but they can’t see their performance. They know the device specifications, but they can’t do detailed device or network monitoring. Agent-based DEX solutions can’t instrument Android or iOS apps, so traditional DEX vendors can’t understand the performance of the majority of mobile devices being used–only Windows devices. And mobile SDKs can only monitor native mobile apps owned by the organization. Vendors of specialized mobile devices, like Zebra, have some mobile DEX capabilities, but only for their mobile devices, not others.

Proactively identify and resolve mobile issues

Aternity Mobile gathers more than 150 metrics on mobile device, app and network performance that enable IT to proactively identify and resolve digital experience issues. Unlike other solutions, Aternity gathers this performance data across Android and iOS for multiple device vendors, including rugged mobile devices and free-standing mobile kiosks.

With Aternity Mobile, IT can identify problems with hardware and battery health, device configuration or network connection and proactively take action to improve employee productivity and customer service.

Detect and resolve individual device issues

With Aternity Mobile, IT can drill down into a specific user’s device to identify and resolve issues affecting productivity. Aternity Mobile enables IT to analyze device health metrics such as storage, RAM, CPU and battery strength and drain rate. It also provides telemetry on signal strength and health of Wi-Fi and cellular networks used by the employee. Analyzing usage patterns of apps and websites enables IT to ensure compliance with corporate usage policies.

Monitor mobile app performance to ensure employee productivity

Aternity Mobile also monitors usage and crashes for every corporate mobile app used by the workforce. Aternity provides detailed information such as the traffic generated by each app, the start and stop time of the app, and the domains the users were accessing with their mobile device, to ensure the mobile device is being used only for company-approved apps. This provides IT with deep insight into how mobile app performance and usage affects productivity and security.

Improve employee engagement with bi-directional communication 

With Aternity Mobile, IT can send contextual and personalized information to employee mobile devices to gather feedback on service quality issues and to provide guidance on ways employees can improve their mobile app and device performance. Aternity Mobile enables IT to proactively inform users of outages, provide information upon app installation/first use, or based on user location, and send warnings when corporate policy usage limits are about to be reached.

Learn more

Now with Mobile DEX, Aternity is the only digital employee experience solution that provides a unified view of actual employee experience, for every enterprise app running on any type of device – laptops, PCs, virtual and mobile–for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and Chromebook. With Aternity, digital workplace leaders gain insights into the digital experience of their entire workforce, no matter where they work, to ensure employees are productive and engaged.

To learn more about Aternity, please visit: riverbed.com/aternity-mobile

Or better yet, watch the replay of our Global Webcast where we cover this, along with other new capabilities from our recent product launch.