{"id":1167,"date":"2021-07-09T18:08:40","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T18:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lakesidesoftware.com\/2021\/07\/09\/how-florida-blue-improves-digital-experience-prognosis-remote-workers-lakeside\/"},"modified":"2024-05-23T04:53:03","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T04:53:03","slug":"how-florida-blue-improves-digital-experience-prognosis-remote-workers-lakeside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lakesidesoftware.com\/blog\/how-florida-blue-improves-digital-experience-prognosis-remote-workers-lakeside\/","title":{"rendered":"How Florida Blue Improves the Digital Experience Prognosis for Remote Workers with Lakeside"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Triage troubles and network issues led the health insurance provider to find digital experience management solutions<\/em>
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Florida Blue, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, is committed to enabling healthier communities through affordable medical insurance and services. But ensuring healthy digital experiences for the insurance provider\u2019s more than 6,500 employees \u2014 most of whom worked remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic? That\u2019s been a more recent project for the enterprise\u2019s senior IT manager, William Smierciak, and service operation teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As public health guidelines and restrictions in early 2020 sent employees to work from home, and IT support tickets began rolling in, Smierciak and Florida Blue\u2019s IT team quickly discovered their old way of troubleshooting was not sufficient for a distributed workforce. In order to address increasing remote work problems in a timelier manner, IT needed to gain better visibility of employees\u2019 home internet networks and wireless configurations; optimize connectivity and network performance; and streamline IT service operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s why Florida Blue chose Lakeside Software\u2019s leading digital experience management (DEM)<\/a> solution to understand what remote workers experience, the root cause, and more efficient ways of providing IT support. Now Lakeside\u2019s Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack<\/a>, helps the enterprise reduce triage time, speed up troubleshooting, and improve productivity for all of Florida Blue\u2019s employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis has been one of the most impressive products that we have used in the environment,\u201d said Smierciak during his session on improving employee productivity at Lakeside\u2019s DEXterity Virtual Conference 2021, \u201cand as we move forward, our utilization is only going to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a closer look at how Florida Blue made it happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Challenge: Slowness and Long Resolution Times for Remote Workers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEverything is slow.\u201d That\u2019s the biggest complaint Florida Blue\u2019s IT teams hear from roughly 30-40% of remote employees using laptops and other Wi-Fi devices for their VPN sessions, according to Smierciak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, of course, that doesn\u2019t give IT technicians a lot to go on. And before implementing Lakeside\u2019s DEM solution, it took IT teams a great deal of time \u2014 sometimes hours, days, or even weeks \u2014 to triage service tickets, investigate what end users experienced, and narrow down the root cause of the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past 15 to 20 years, Florida Blue\u2019s IT team has depended on a very manual way of troubleshooting slowness and other issues:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  • With remote assistance, troubleshooting involved interrupting the user\u2019s work to review logs, observe symptoms first-hand, or \u201ctweak\u201d the system to improve the experience. Without remote assistance, though, technicians would need to go on location, or have the user bring in their device for servicing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • IT teams remotely pull Event Viewer or application logs (when available) and spend time to manually go through them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Lots of Googling to come up with ideas for what to do.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • User ended up with a new device while IT continued troubleshooting with the old one. It was faster to just provide employees with a new machine, reinstall apps, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Even after devoting all that time and all those resources, though, the process was very hit-or-miss, Smierciak admitted. In the end, IT couldn\u2019t always identify the exact issue and the exact solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cWhile we were trying to identify a possible solution or a ramp up to a systemic solution for the entire enterprise, it didn\u2019t come without a cost from either the user, the technician, or even from the vendor,\u201d Smierciak said. \u201cAll of that equals time, and obviously time equals money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n