A new trend is emerging in IT.
Technical professionals are increasingly responsible for supporting adoption activities and helping their organizations ensure they’re maximizing their tech investments and making important technology decisions. As a result of these trends, a new category of role is springing up within and alongside IT departments: the technology decision influencer (TDI).
To support their work, we designed the Experience insights dashboard, a new feature for the Microsoft 365 admin center that’s now available as a public preview for our customers. It provides crucial insights for TDIs across product usage, feedback, views on help articles, and more.
Within Microsoft, the dashboard is helping our change management professionals understand how employees use Microsoft 365, their pain points, and where they need support. As a result, we’re driving more streamlined, effective, compliant usage across our organization.
[Read more about a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork. Discover how Microsoft used change management best practices to launch a new business intelligence platform. Explore how Microsoft enables a modern support experience. Unpack how Microsoft communicates with employees directly using Teams.]
Connecting IT and business through technology decision influencers
The rise of the TDI is closely linked to rapid changes in the working world. Fast-moving digital transformation combined with the move to hybrid work and the consumerization of IT mean that technical professionals are responsible for going the extra mile to empower users. They help employees do more with less, create a positive experience for users, and ensure their companies get the most out of their IT investments.
At their core, TDI roles are about empowering users to find the best technology to meet their needs while ensuring their tools are secure, compliant, cost-efficient, and as simple as possible for IT to manage. Those outcomes largely rely on using their technology properly and effectively.
“When people aren’t using the whole experience, it can make them dissatisfied with the product,” says Amisha Bhatia, principal product manager for Microsoft 365 admin center. “Sometimes you have to train people how to use a tool properly for them to really start maximizing its benefits.”
But to help employees get the full benefit of the technology they use while influencing organizational technology investments, TDIs need the right kinds of data. That includes usage behaviors, feedback, and even the kinds of support material users access when they’re having trouble.
“Your Microsoft 365 tenant is a great source of information about the actions users take every day, but we need to balance a respect for privacy with making that data easily accessible,” says David Johnson, principal program manager architect with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, our internal IT organization. “Abstracting user data up from those individual actions is incredibly valuable because it helps adoption specialists identify where we need to scale as a tenant and what divisions they need to support.”
We saw an opportunity to make that data available for Microsoft 365 users through the Experience insights dashboard.
Insights that influence decisions and enable adoption
The Experience insights dashboard represents the recognition of IT’s changing role and how administrative features can support it. Previously, administrative tools were purely focused on deployment and configuration—a way for IT teams to keep the lights on for organizations.
With the change we’re seeing over the last couple of years in these more prominent TDI roles, we’re building Microsoft 365 admin center experiences that expand on IT’s new and evolving responsibilities.
—Amisha Bhatia, principal product manager, Microsoft 365 admin center
Experience insights is the key to a whole new model. It enables three core functions for TDIs:
- User experience: Understanding Microsoft 365 experience data to find opportunities and value
- IT training: Training employees to use technology more efficiently
- Adoption strategy: Setting adoption strategies and rollout plans
This dashboard is accessible through either the Microsoft 365 admin center or a Teams app. It shows TDIs data across usage, sentiment, and support to give them a complete view of their organization’s experience with Microsoft 365. It even introduces a new level of admin access tailored to their roles: the user experience success manager.
“With the change we’re seeing over the last couple of years in these more prominent TDI roles, we’re building Microsoft 365 admin center experiences that expand on IT’s new and evolving responsibilities,” Bhatia says.
The Experience insights dashboard lets change management professionals drill down into specific information that helps them identify opportunities to improve users’ engagement with Microsoft 365 products and experiences. It provides four overarching data categories for TDIs that they can view across different divisions within an organization:
- Active usage: Overall data on product and experience usage that TDIs can break down by individual product features (available in some products)
- In-product feedback: Unsolicited feedback that users volunteer within the apps they use
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey response rates: Feedback through solicited in-product surveys
- Help article views: The specific articles users view when they access support.microsoft.com or in-app help experiences
Each of these data categories provides an essential piece of the puzzle for TDIs to encourage healthy Microsoft 365 adoption and advise decision makers on an organization’s overall technology strategy.
The unification of data across sources and signals is very important for roles that traditionally haven’t had access to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
—Amy Ceurvorst, success specialist, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience
Empowering change management professionals in a rich technology ecosystem
Now that TDIs are no longer reliant on data they request piecemeal from their IT colleagues, they can conduct the kind of research that leads to deep organizational insights. At Microsoft, it’s revolutionizing how we handle change management. And at the heart of that revolution are our success strategists and adoption specialists.
“The unification of data across sources and signals is very important for roles that traditionally haven’t had access to the Microsoft 365 admin center,” says Amy Ceurvorst, success specialist with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “It’s opened up our eyes to all new types of data we can use in our roles.”
A success specialist’s workflow frequently starts with a question about app usage. For example, they might observe that a particular tool is underutilized in their organization compared to others. They can then isolate that tool and drill down through the usage data to determine which features are most or least helpful for the organization’s employees.
As an IT organization, it’s easy to lose the forest through the trees. By abstracting individual actions and looking at what drives behavioral changes across a company, you’re refocusing on the forest.
—David Johnson, principal program manager architect, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience
From there, they can see what users are saying through in-product feedback channels. Meanwhile, investigating the support articles the organization’s employees access the most provides insights into the issues they encounter in their day-to-day.
All this data equips a success specialist to provide appropriate training and communication to help organizations adopt apps more thoroughly or get the most out of their experiences by optimizing usage. Their efforts help boost productivity and improve engagement. The tool also gives TDIs the ability to advise decision makers about technology decisions with real data about employee usage and effectiveness.
“As an IT organization, it’s easy to lose the forest through the trees,” Johnson says. “By abstracting individual actions and looking at what drives behavioral changes across a company, you’re refocusing on the forest,” says David Johnson.
The Experience insights dashboard is helping our IT organization build a culture of active insights. At the same time, it means that people in primarily functional or administrative IT roles don’t have to expend energy on solely organizational or strategic concerns. That’s helpful, considering how resource-constrained most IT teams can be.
By providing TDIs with the data they need, the Experience insights dashboard is unlocking all kinds of new possibilities for organizational growth and technology adoption. We’re already accumulating valuable insights to help us build our technology strategy for upcoming fiscal years. Ultimately, it’s equipping our change management professionals with the data they need to be effective organizational partners to leaders and employees alike.
“If you’re not working on the right things, you might not have the right impact,” Ceurvorst says. “But this tool is giving the right people in the right roles the data that they need to do their jobs.”
Are you a Microsoft 365 user with over 2000 seats in your tenant? Preview the Experience insights dashboard for the Microsoft 365 admin center today.
- Identify your key change management roles—like an experience success manager—and assign them the proper permissions in the Experience insights dashboard.
- Start with high-level trends in usage, especially for your most-used products.
- If certain features are lagging, drill down into feedback, net promoter scores, and help articles.
- Understand your levers for change, including who and what influences those changes.
- Align change management with the culture of your organization.
- Recognize that driving technical change management is more than an IT concern.
- Read more about a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
- Discover how Microsoft used change management best practices to launch a new business intelligence platform.
- Explore how Microsoft enables a modern support experience.
- Unpack how Microsoft communicates with employees directly using Teams.
Tags: digital transformation, Microsoft 365, product adoption, user-experience
