The two most dreaded letters in today’s office environment are “IT,” according to the Swiss-based company, Nexthink. Employees waste an average of 22 minutes a day frustrated by IT problems, and the IT department spends a lot more time than that trying to fix things, says Nexthink.
Nexthink Co-founder and CEO Pedro Bados made it his mission to transform the way IT departments service and support employees.
Nexthink does that by giving IT real-time visibility across the digital workplace, gathering real-time feedback from employees and automating fixes, the company says.
“Customers experience up to a 30% reduction of IT incidents, resulting in dramatic savings in support costs and less employee frustration,” Nexthink claims. “The platform also allows companies to transform the digital workplace with real-time analytics across the entire end-user computing landscape.”
That’s marketing-speak to explain that Bados and Nexthink figured out a way for IT departments to actually know what’s going on – as it’s going on — giving them a chance to stay ahead of problems.
The company grew out of Bados’ advanced artificial intelligence research project in 2002 at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. At that time, Bados was receiving a master’s degree computer science and electrical engineering, with a special degree in AI, “when it was not so hot,” he says.
One of the outside reviewers of Bados’ project was an IT director at a famous watch company that Bados can’t name, who said the research was so innovative that if it could be turned into a product, he would buy it.
That was all Bados needed to hear.
Nexthink was formed soon after, and two years later, that famous watch company became its first customer. Bados, 38, filed for two patents in the process of forming his company: one for real-time visualization, and the other for using artificial intelligence and self-learning to determine abnormal behaviors.
“We’re able to detect the problems, fix the problems in real time and compute a digital experience score to offer a better and better digital experience for employees,” Bados said.
Before Nexthink, says Bados, there was no standard for benchmarking employees’ digital experiences. Nexthink’s scale runs from 0 to 10, with most companies initially falling somewhere between 4 and 7.
Bados said that especially now, with more and more Millennials in the workplace, it’s important to provide the kind of IT support Nexthink makes possible.
“Ask any 25-year-old person,” he said. “They’re expecting a super high quality digital experience, with a great computer and everything working, and if they don’t get it, they leave the company. This is a huge problem.”
