We talked with Pedro Bados, CEO and co-founder of Nexthink
How would you describe Nexthink in a single tweet?
We enable businesses to measure, manage and radically improve their employees’ digital experiences by enhancing the performance of workplace technologies.
How did it all start and why?
I developed and patented the core technology that underpins Nexthink while studying at the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne). Nexthink solves the problem of how leaders in large, complex, companies can improve the digital experiences for their employees.
Companies are in a war for talent, trying to retain existing employees and attract new ones. If day-to-day experiences at work are not positive, then current employees will leave and new talent won’t join. Employee experience has historically focused on two important pillars (people and places), which include culture, morale, company perks, great office spaces and more. However, as companies have marched forward with bold digital transformation initiatives, employees have increasingly become dependent on a wide variety of technologies and applications to work efficiently and effectively. These digital initiatives have significantly increased the importance of a third pillar of the employee experience equation… technology — leading companies to realise they must actively monitor and maintain it as closely as their focus on people and places. For many people, getting work done has become clunky, slow, and frustrating because the technology doesn’t work.
Our technology platform enables IT teams to leverage real-time application and device data, coupled with timely and contextually-relevant user sentiment, to better understand how technology is experienced within their company. This enables the business to understand what needs to be improved or what should become a best practice moving forward. Improving employees’ digital experiences will have a massive impact on productivity, employee engagement and a business’ bottom line.
What have you achieved so far?
Nexthink has seen massive growth in recent years (most recently 80% year-on-year growth) and, in December 2018, we secured $85 million in funding in an investment round led by Index Ventures. The business has been accelerating international growth and expansion in key markets, including the United States, and we have over 550 employees across offices in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
We now have over 1,000 enterprise customers (up from 900 in 2018), reaching 8 million endpoints (up from 7 million in 2018). Customers include the likes of Tiffany & Co., Glencore, Commerzbank, Manpower, Wipro, Western Union and many more.
Earlier this year, we launched the Nexthink Digital Experience Score system as part of our commitment to providing our customers with the strongest Digital Employee Experience solution available today. Our customers now have the ability to measure employee experience across the enterprise and see, through hard data, if IT roll-outs are actually achieving the goals set for them, and how helpful (or not) they’ve been for employees. Customers can also now benchmark their scores with anonymised, aggregated data, enabling them to measure against their industry peers, in terms of geography, market and company size.
What do you plan to achieve in the next 2-3 years?
We will continue with our international expansion and I will be moving with my family to Boston in 2020 so the business will have dual-headquarters in the US and Switzerland. We will continue to innovate with new products and services, and hire the best people in the industry to serve our customers as the global leader in Digital Employee Experience.
We believe the Digital Experience Score will become a true guiding star that businesses can look to when considering improvements. With real-time, hard data at the fingertips of IT, the business will be able to consistently improve while continuing to evolve. Our standardised experience scores will set a reference for businesses to measure their Digital Employee Experience just as the Net Promoter Score has become the standard for measuring Customer Experience.
