Are Your Users Hungry for More? 6 Ways to Serve Up a Great Experience

Over the past year there has been much talk about how IT can better support the remote worker. To be certain, remote work has driven an increased use of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to not only enable remote access to business data and applications, but to help IT simplify and control management of remote workers as they engage with business data outside the security of the corporate firewall.

Yes, ensuring security policies are in place and simplifying IT management for user workspaces is important. But what about the user experience (UX)? Are employees as productive at home as they are in the office? Are login times what they should be? Are they able to access the applications and data they need to get the job done?

Considering employee experience for your VDI environments just might be the most vital metric for virtual desktop success. Consider this: according to Gartner, workers with a good UX are 1.5 times more likely than others to have high levels of work effectiveness, productivity and intent to stay. This can be essential in a time where employee retention and recruiting are of top priority.

In fact, a great computing user experience can help employees perform beyond their job requirements and keep business productivity high. This has been a challenge with remote work. According to an IGEL survey, 61% of IT professionals named user experience as their top challenge when moving employees to a remote work model. This is driving the adoption of technologies for employee experience management, which was ranked the highest (58%) by IT professionals in the priorities they have over the next 12 months.

How to Improve Employee Experience?

Delivering a great VDI user experience will help keep employees happy, productive and engaged in their work. Here are six things to consider when working to achieve this goal. You can also schedule a free VDI Demo and earn a free pie - just click on the image below:

1. 1. Get Login Time Under 30 Seconds.
2. Users don’t have patience. Once they login they want to get to work, so VDI environments that take more than 30 seconds to load will make users cranky, before they can even start to work. Be sure to optimize your environment to minimize login time so that users don’t get frustrated. Take our free 30-second challenge. If you have slow logins, give us just 8 hours and we will give you login times under 30 seconds or charge you nothing.
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4. 2. Proactively Monitor User Experience.
5. Don’t wait for your users to complain before you remediate issues. Monitoring end-user experience, day and night, with the ability to take action will help you get from reactive to proactive and solve user issues before they even become noticed. There are some great monitoring solutions available for VDI environments, such as ControlUp, that can give you actionable insights into employee productivity so you can remediate them fast.
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7. 3. Empower Users with Training.
8. An uninformed user is an unproductive one. Be sure that you train users properly on the VDI solutions and applications they use day in and day out. If users are more versed in the tools they rely on, their experience will be much better overall. Offer regular training sessions and self-service resources to give users the opportunity to solve their own challenges. This will make them feel more empowered (while also lightening the load on internal IT resources).
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10. 4. Become a Help Desk Superstar.
11. Because remote workers don’t have the luxury of just walking down the hall or catching IT in the break room, they still want to know they can get help easily when working from home. Remember too that work hours have extended in the work from home era. Employees now have greater access to their work resources anytime of day and night - as such they may also demand help outside of the typical 9-5 operating hours. Be sure to have adequate help desk staff to support your user population and offer support 24-hours a day so employees aren’t waiting for the support they need.
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13. 5. Consider Managed VDI Services.
14. Delivering a great user experience takes experience. For the best result, consider a managed or co-managed option for your virtual desktop environment if the desktop virtualization skillset is not a strength. Experts can help you optimize VDI performance, guide you on OS versions and patching roll-ups to deploy or avoid, get the most out of the available features, resolve complex incidents and architect your environment and the your applications for optimal performance. At Whitehat Virtual we use a proven process and 1,500+ cataloged optimizations to deliver managed VDI solutions with the best experience. Learn more here.
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16. 6. Make it Easy as Pie with Hyperconverged VDI.
17. A complete VDI-in-a-box product, such as Whitehat Virtual’s Titanium HCI, will deliver a virtual desktop experience that’s inexpensive, simple and just works. It’s like an “easy button” for virtual desktops. It comes with the latest software - with upgrades for life - reliable hyperconverged hardware and lifetime management guaranteeing the end-user experience will not degrade. That means it’s fully deployed, managed and supported for the best possible user experience. It’s the complete solution for less than 30-second logins, proactive monitoring, automatic issue resolution and no performance bottlenecks without additional staff or resource requirements.

No matter your virtual desktop approach, be sure to place priority on your users’ experience. By giving them the best access to their data and applications you will help your business achieve greater productivity and work to keep valued employees happy - no matter where they are working.

Don’t leave your users hungry for the experience they want. Learn More About Titanium HCI today.