Engage is Nexthink's employee communication and Voice of the Customer module. It closes the feedback loop that telemetry alone cannot close: capturing what employees think and feel about their digital experience, not just what the data shows. A well-run Engage program is the difference between an IT organization that knows it has a problem and one that understands why.
Terminology
These two terms are closely related and often used interchangeably, but they mean different things. Getting this right matters when planning programs, writing documentation, or briefing stakeholders.
For the rest of this page, Engage refers to the product and Campaign refers to an individual communication item you deploy through it.
Core Capability
Engage supports four distinct campaign patterns. Most DEX programs use all four: they serve different purposes and work together as part of a continuous feedback and communication system rather than as standalone tools.
Collect employee feedback on digital experience at key moments
Survey campaigns push questions directly to employees' desktops as a pop-up notification: not email, not a link to an external form. Because the notification appears inline with the employee's workflow, response rates are significantly higher than traditional survey methods.
The most valuable survey campaigns are triggered by experience events: an employee's application just crashed, their VPN reconnected after a drop, or their device performance just recovered from a CPU spike. Surveying immediately after the experience captures accurate sentiment, not a week-later reconstruction of how an employee felt about something that's already faded from memory.
Survey results flow back into the Nexthink platform as data that can be correlated with telemetry from the same device and the same time window. This is what separates Engage from any standalone survey tool.
NPS CSAT Rating scale Yes / No Multiple choice Open textPush important information directly to employees' desktops
Notification campaigns deliver one-way announcements to employees as desktop pop-ups: planned maintenance windows, system changes, IT tip reminders, or new tool announcements. They exist because IT communication through email suffers from low open rates and zero targeting capability.
The key advantage over email: Engage can target a notification only to employees for whom it is relevant. A patch deployment notification goes only to devices that need that patch, not the entire company. A Teams call quality tip goes only to employees who have shown poor call quality in the last 7 days. The message is relevant to the person receiving it, which increases engagement and reduces noise for everyone else.
Notifications can require acknowledgment (employee must click "Got it") or be passive dismissals, giving IT a signal about whether the communication landed.
Rapid employee notification during outages and security events
When a major incident occurs, a widespread outage, a cybersecurity event, a critical system failure,the fastest way to get information in front of employees is an Engage notification. It appears immediately on the desktop of every affected device, without relying on employees to check email or Teams channels they may not have open.
Incident campaigns do two things simultaneously: they inform employees of what's happening and what to do, and they prevent the flood of service desk tickets that follows any major incident when employees don't know the issue is already being worked. Reducing call volume during an active incident is one of the most measurable ROI moments for Engage.
After the incident resolves, a follow-up survey campaign can measure whether employees understood the communication, whether their service has been restored, and how confident they are in IT's response: feeding into post-incident review data.
Campaigns that fire automatically when a telemetry condition is met
Automated campaigns are where Engage's integration with the Nexthink data platform creates something that no standalone survey tool can replicate. Instead of scheduling a survey, you define a trigger condition in the platform: "Send this survey to any employee whose device just recovered from a BSOD" or "Send this notification to any device where available disk space just dropped below 10GB."
The campaign fires automatically, in real time, when the condition is met on a specific device: without requiring a human to decide, schedule, or send anything. The result is continuous, event-driven feedback collection that matches the scale and speed of the endpoint fleet itself.
Automated campaigns require the IT team to think in terms of experience events rather than calendar schedules. The design question shifts from "when should we survey employees?" to "what experience moments are worth capturing feedback on as they happen?"
Trigger on telemetry events No manual scheduling Real-time response captureHow It Works
The core problem with traditional employee surveys is that they're sent to everyone on a calendar schedule, regardless of whether the message is relevant to that person right now. Engage solves this with data-driven targeting that uses the Nexthink platform's knowledge of each device and user to determine who should receive a campaign and when.
Scope campaigns to specific departments, locations, job roles, device types, or OS versions using user and device attributes already in the Nexthink platform. Useful for role-specific surveys, location-based maintenance notifications, or OS migration communications.
Target employees whose device currently meets a specific telemetry condition: low DEX score, recent application crashes, slow logon times, poor network quality, or specific software installed. The campaign reaches the people actually affected, not a random sample.
Define a telemetry event that fires the campaign automatically: a BSOD, a VPN reconnect, an application crash, a performance recovery. The campaign runs continuously in the background and fires for each employee as their device meets the condition, capturing in-the-moment feedback at scale.
Send to a defined population at a set time: useful for periodic satisfaction checks, post-project surveys, or regular pulse tracking. Even scheduled campaigns benefit from the demographic and experience-condition filters to ensure relevance.
Define when campaigns can appear (business hours only, after a minimum interval since the last campaign, not during specific blackout periods). These guardrails prevent survey fatigue and ensure Engage doesn't become another source of digital noise.
Since mid-2025, Engage protects respondent identity by removing usernames from results by default. Managers and IT teams see aggregate sentiment and trends, not individual employee responses: which increases candor and participation rates over time.
The Strategic Advantage
The most powerful thing about Engage isn't the campaigns themselves: it's what happens when survey responses are joined with endpoint telemetry from the same device and the same time window. This correlation is what separates a DEX measurement program from a simple employee survey program.
Without Engage, the Nexthink platform tells you what is happening technically. With Engage, it also tells you what employees experience and feel as a result. The gap between those two datasets, where technical metrics are fine but sentiment is poor, or where metrics are bad but employees seem unbothered,is often where the most important insights live. Either the data is telling you something the employees haven't articulated, or the employees are telling you something the data hasn't captured. Both gaps are worth investigating.
Campaign Design
The quality of feedback you collect from Engage is almost entirely determined by how well you design the campaign. These are the design principles and configuration choices that separate campaigns that produce actionable data from ones that produce noise.
Measurement
Campaign results inside Nexthink show more than aggregate scores: they show response patterns over time, cohort breakdowns, and correlation with the telemetry data from responding devices. Here is what experienced practitioners pay attention to.
A low response rate often signals poor targeting (message not relevant) or poor timing (sent during a busy period). It can also mean employees have lost trust that surveys produce action. A well-targeted, well-timed campaign should regularly achieve 60–70%+ response rates. If you're below 30%, investigate the cause before optimizing the questions.
A single data point from a campaign is rarely actionable. The value is in the trend: whether satisfaction on a specific dimension is improving, stable, or degrading over time. Establish a baseline before making changes, then measure whether the change moved the score in the expected direction. Without before/after, you can't demonstrate that an intervention worked.
An average satisfaction score of 3.8/5 across the fleet tells you very little. The same data broken down by department, location, or device type often reveals one cohort pulling the average down sharply while others score well. The aggregate masks the actionable signal. Always look at the distribution, not just the mean.
Compare the devices that gave low satisfaction scores against the telemetry data for those same devices in the same time window. If the low-scorers also show elevated CPU, higher crash rates, or worse network quality, the technical data confirms the sentiment and gives you a specific remediation path. If the telemetry is clean for low-scoring devices, the problem may be perception, communication, or process rather than a technical issue.
Open text responses from Engage campaigns can surface issue categories you didn't think to ask about. Common themes in free-text responses become input for structured questions in future campaigns or new monitoring rules in the platform. In Workspace, you can ask Workspace to summarize themes from recent campaign open-text responses to accelerate this analysis.
Who didn't respond is sometimes as informative as who did. If a specific department consistently has 15% response rates while the fleet average is 65%, that's a signal about that group's relationship with IT communication: not just their survey habits. Investigate whether that group has had consistently poor experience outcomes, unresolved issues, or lacks trust in IT responsiveness.
Before You Start
Engage is technically straightforward to configure, but the organizational conditions for getting value from it take time to establish. These are the prerequisites that practitioners consistently identify as the difference between a mature Engage program and one that produces data nobody acts on.
A campaign targeted to "all devices with a specific condition" only reaches devices where the Collector is deployed. With 60% coverage, 40% of your fleet is invisible to Engage. For fleet-wide sentiment programs to be representative, target 90%+ Collector coverage before relying on results for strategic decisions.
Engage's most powerful targeting uses department, location, and role attributes from your identity provider or CMDB. If those attributes are incomplete or inconsistent in Nexthink, your demographic targeting will be inaccurate. Invest in data quality before running department-specific campaigns.
Engage without a defined process for reviewing results and initiating action teaches employees that surveys are performative. Someone needs to own the data: reviewing it on a cadence, escalating findings, and closing the loop with employees. Without this, response rates will decline over time as employees learn nothing changes as a result.
Employees seeing a pop-up survey from an unfamiliar IT tool for the first time will be suspicious of it. Before deploying Engage broadly, communicate to employees what it is, what data it collects, who can see responses, and how the results will be used. Trust is a prerequisite for honest answers.
The most common missed opportunity in Engage programs is failing to run a baseline campaign before a major IT change. Without a pre-change sentiment measurement, you can't demonstrate whether the change improved employee experience. Build baselining into every significant initiative's project plan.
Engage's value depends on employees treating notifications as relevant and trustworthy. Survey fatigue erodes that quickly. Configure platform-level frequency limits (e.g., maximum one campaign per employee per day, minimum 3 days between surveys) before enabling multiple campaign owners across the IT organization.
Continue
Engage and Flow are closely linked: the most effective Engage programs trigger campaigns in response to events that Flow can then remediate. Understanding how automated remediation connects to automated feedback collection is where the full closed-loop potential of the platform becomes visible.
Statistics and technical details on this page are sourced from Nexthink official documentation, product pages, and release notes for the Nexthink Infinity platform. View full references →