Do Your Employees Regularly Complain About Application Performance Issues?

Everyone considers themselves a mobile expert these days, from the employee who doesn’t know how to navigate an app to the pseudo-intellectual millennial who is convinced iOS users “don’t know what they’re missing.” The reality is these people are the ones who are going to be using, and more importantly complaining, about your apps.

Today’s enterprise users are becoming more cavalier, have more choices, and as a result have higher expectations with respect to application performance across all platforms. With these expectations often comes critique of these corporate apps. When your sales forecasting app crashes during the weekly management meeting, end users become irritable and critical decisions may be delayed. If the workforce can’t get into a vital productivity app on their desktops, ten to 20 minutes of lost productivity for thousands of employees is detrimental for any business large or small. The native enterprise mobile app is a whole other monster that needs to be tamed.

Your organization has spent countless hours building and testing a new native enterprise mobile app and it’s just been released. All things considered, you think your team has done a pretty awesome job covering all the bases, staying within budget and producing a functioning app that gets the job done.

But it’s only once you go live with end users that you find the issues that no amount of testing would have found. And once the users have their devices loaded and ready to go with the shiny new app do the most critical problems arise. You can’t help them directly because they are mobile and in the field; you simply don’t have the visibility needed to effectively support them. So how do you know which problems are user error and which seriously need your attention?

This is when you understand the value of end user management and troubleshooting tools.

Making sure you have an end user management mobile tool will be your saving grace when it comes to complaints and trying to determine the real cause of workforce complaints – is it the app, is it the user, is it the device or is it the interaction of all three?

“Not that long ago, we received a call from an irate user,” said Steve Shultz, Operations Director at Retriever Communications. “The user was a contractor using a BYOD device. He’d recently started using the mobility app and had just received a $700 excess mobile data bill from his carrier. The mobile tool helped us identify that the mobile app was fine – it was the 16 other apps that were being used, with Facebook at the top of the list!

“Sometimes even with the best intent the users will complain about an issue but the tools prove something quite different. We had users complaining that device battery life wouldn’t last for a shift. It became apparent that users weren’t charging devices at the end of the shift and the tool showed that many users were leaving home to start their day with only 20 percent battery charge.

“When a mobile worker calls into a support desk he expects to get immediate support,” continued Shultz. “You can’t have a field worker wasting time with an application that is not giving him the information he needs to do his job or he won’t bother using it. The key is being able to get that user operational as quickly as possible.”

Tools that allow remote visibility of the device, the app and the end user experience at the same time are fundamental.

“The fact is that even as devices have become faster and networks more ubiquitous you need powerful application management tools to keep that remote user productive and happy.”

So, how should you as an IT management pro deal with user issues?

There are many factors that go into making an enterprise app successful. Just producing an app is not enough; you need to proactively manage the performance, maintain it constantly and continue to update it. This is where the challenges begin. Being prepared for the complaints is one thing, but actually being able to properly assess and remediate them quickly is another. Having the right app management tool can cut out a lot of valuable time when you’re trying to figure out what complaints are legit and which ones are just disgruntled employees making false claims.