Toyota, one of the world’s largest car manufacturers, has embarked on a project to transform its digital employee experience (DEX).
In the US, Toyota has ambitions to eliminate its traditional IT service desk this year, and if it’s unable to hit that target, it aims to at least reduce IT help desk calls by 80%. Part of the strategy to get there is the use of automation, predictive analytics and virtual assistants. “The traditional service desk is always reactive,” says Zakir Mohammed, manager of artificial intelligence and automation at Toyota.
Looking at the experience employees can go through on a traditional IT help desk, he says it can take days or even weeks for support personnel to reach out to someone to fix an IT problem. For instance, if someone needed a new piece of software, they would need to raise a help desk ticket. In Mohammed’s experience, two to three days later, IT support would contact the individual who raised the ticket, then block out a slot of 30 minutes or an hour to install the application.
“There was a lot of reactiveness happening,” he says. “At some point, our employees gave up opening tickets and started suffering in silence. We decided the traditional way of running a help desk was not sustainable. We needed to have a proactive approach.”
The company is a Gartner client, and Gartner’s digital employee experience market research recommends tools that conform to industry standards. Gartner defines DEX management tools as software that measures and continuously improves the performance of employee sentiment towards company-provided technology.
The tools tend to offer near-real-time processing of aggregated data from endpoints, applications, employee sentiment and actionable insights, which, according to Gartner, can power self-healing automations and also be used to enhance employee interactions with self-service portals and chatbots. Gartner says DEX tools also help IT support, asset management, procurement and other teams whose work depends on reliable information. “Some of the tools and technology we evaluated look very promising,” says Mohammed. “But the tool we currently use is Nexthink, which aligns with our requirements.”
Instead of waiting for IT issues to be manually triaged, Toyota’s 100,000 staff members now benefit from the IT department using Nexthink’s DEX technology to proactively detect, diagnose and remedy IT issues across endpoints.
Getting started with DEX
Toyota initially began a small-scale pilot using Nexthink with 100 users. Mohammed says metrics were collected, enabling the IT team to understand the issues the pilot users were experiencing.
For Mohammed, among the challenges Toyota faced was that while it had deployed advanced observability tools to monitor business applications and IT infrastructure such as storage, the company lacked the tools required to monitor users, the performance of their devices, their experience of the IT they used and their overall sentiment.
Given people are considered a business’s most important asset, Mohammed believes it’s important to measure their experience of the IT they require to do their jobs.
Having evaluated a sample of 100 employees, he says: “What we saw was kind of eye-opening. There were so many issues.”
Toyota then scaled up the proof of concept to 30,000 users. This step involved using automation. “We deployed to 30,000 users,” says Mohammed. “We were not only collecting the information, but we also started automating.”
Discussing the benefits of the roll-out, he says Toyota now has visibility of user devices, which helps the company offer a seamless digital experience and automation of certain help desk tasks.
Nexthink is also being used for predictive maintenance, such as replacing laptop batteries before they die. “If the performance of a certain type of battery is going from 80% to 60% in the next six months, these batteries may require replacement,” says Mohammed. “This is great information for the IT delivery team. It means they not only buy the batteries in advance, but can also proactively replace them before the old battery dies.”
Another way Nexthink is being used is in software reclamation. “There are tonnes of software sitting on laptops and we’re paying software licenses for them,” he says. “Nexthink is able to check if the software has been used in the past 90 days. This information can then be used to send an automated message to ask if the application is still required. I click and it’s automatically reclaimed by the IT software library.”
The final piece of the DEX story at Toyota is the use of a virtual assistant. “We want to make it like a ChatGPT for Toyota, so that employees can submit a request and it does the work behind the scenes,” says Mohammed.
In effect, the virtual assistant is used to parse free text entered by users and translate these requests into actions that can be sent to Nexthink.
One of the other uses of the virtual assistant is to enable users to request software directly. “If you need PowerBI, it connects behind the scenes with Nexthink, picks up the software and installs it,” he says. “You don’t have to do anything. Once the install is done, you get a notification saying that your software is ready.”
If Toyota’s goal is to reduce IT help desk calls, the ability for a user to have IT problems proactively resolved via a virtual assistant, or perhaps use it to request new software, shows where digital employee experience is heading.