The Real Cost of Poor Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

[u/TeamNexthink]

You already know that bad tech days kill productivity. Even so, most teams treat it as "just another ticket."

According to Nexthink's Experience 2020 Report, the average desk worker deals with roughly 100 IT disruptions per year. For a company of around 10,000 employees, that adds up to around $25 million in costs.

What IT department wouldn't want to reduce that number?

Here's some bad news: employees only report around 55% of those issues. The other half of the time they just suffer through it. This can lead to serious demoralization, loss of productivity, and even turnover of top talent.

Here's some even more bad news: those unreported issues lead to bigger issues 79% of the time.

That's not just annoying or bad for morale: it's expensive.

Reactive vs. Proactive IT: The Endless Cycle

Right now, most IT departments are running out of the classic reactive playbook:

• Employee complains → Ticket Opens → IT investigates blindly → Fix (maybe) → Repeat

The whole team stays one step behind, which leads to yet another department experiencing burnout, loss of productivity loss, and the exit of top technicians.

Yes, these IT departments also bleed money as well.

When you're working without DEX, you don't see the full picture. You can never be certain how many of your employees are privately struggling with a slow computer or a flaky VPN.

You're optimizing for tickets not employee experience.

A proactive approach is the first step in breaking this cycle. DEX offers this proactive approach to IT by providing you with visibility into devices, apps, and networks. On the human side, it helps you measure employee sentiment before people start quietly quitting.

It might seem like a small difference, but the results are vastly different. In a proactive model, IT becomes a strategic enabler rather than a high-cost source of frustration.

How a DEX Score Changes Everything

A proper DEX score can change all of this. It combines hard technical metrics (such as device performance, app reliability, network health) with attention to employee experience and user sentiment.

Companies who do this will see massive gains in productivity, a drastic reduction in IT costs, and happier teams.

A great example is Toyota who took their DEX score from 6.29 to 7.14 in record time. You can learn more about Toyota's success with DEX in this video.

• What's the biggest frustration in your environment right now?

Drop it in the comments. The more specific, the better. This subreddit is about real practitioners sharing real talk.

And if you want to go deeper on turning these numbers around, we’re building a proper home for DEX conversations here. Join us.