As enterprises look for ways to gain an edge on competitors, one key area still appears to be lacking attention: frontline workers. These are the people who execute company strategy, bring products to life, and act as the face of the brand, and they need to be in full alignment with wider organization. Yet Unily research shows that 72% aren’t even aware of their company’s strategy, and only 24% feel their feedback from customer interactions are heard by leadership.
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One part of the solution is frontline analytics: the strategic use of data to understand and enhance frontline performance. In this guide, we explore why frontline analytics matters, the benefits it can bring, and how it applies across a range of frontline-heavy sectors.
What is frontline analytics?
Frontline analytics is about collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to frontline workers. Without this, businesses can be operating blindly without the data needed to make better decisions around content and information This can include:
- Employee sentiment tracking
- Engagement with content and communications
- Usage and completion of training materials
- Operational metrics like attendance, task completion, and productivity
By leveraging this type of data, organizations can make more informed decisions. This in turn helps them solve problems and optimize ways of working – ultimately helping with overall company objectives.
Whether those objectives are increasing revenue, driving efficiencies, or improving brand awareness – frontline analytics can play a key role in facilitating this.
Why is frontline analytics important?
Studies show that the overall data analytics market is worth almost $70 billion, and this could rise to over $300 billion by 2030. Clearly, it’s an area businesses are looking to invest in. But why is frontline analytics of such importance? Here are a few things it can help you achieve.
Make smarter decisions
Most analytics initiatives have traditionally focused on back-office operations or customer data. But it’s the actions of your frontline employees that directly influence things like customer satisfaction and safety outcomes.
Therefore, it’s important to have hard data from this part of the workforce. This will ensure you make decisions from a place of clarity, rather than relying solely on instinct.
By tracking how frontline employees engage with communications and tools, organizations can make smarter decisions that resonate at the point of delivery.
Unlock hidden insights
Based predominantly at the heartbeat of an enterprise, frontline workers often have insights that nobody else has. Whether it’s operational inefficiencies, safety concerns, customer behavior, or product challenges – getting real-time employee feedback from them can have a genuine impact on business goals.
Frontline analytics provides a more structured method to collect this feedback – turning the daily workflow into a source of strategic intelligence.
Create role-relevant training
The needs of someone on the frontline can be very different to those at HQ. Yet many organizations rely on one-size-fits-all training. Unily’s research showed that 36% of frontline workers feel their corporate colleagues have better access to training. One reason for this could be that training – outside of mandatory, job-related inductions – doesn’t feel tailored to their needs.
It's something we discussed in our frontline training guide, but with good analytics, organizations can get a better grasp of what employees need. This enables personalized upskilling pathways – which doesn’t just help frontline staff improve, but creates better engagement and loyalty to the business.
Personalize communications
Speaking of tailoring to individual needs, the same also applies for communications. 28% of our survey respondents said they wanted comms to be more personalized and role-relevant. Again, frontline analytics can play a critical role – allowing IC teams to see which teams are engaging with what content, and where there are gaps.
Disconnected and disengaged:
The economic cost of frontline friction
Reduce turnover
Frontline roles are often high-churn positions. By leveraging sentiment analysis and feedback tools, enterprises can:
- Identify early warning signs of disengagement
- Detect patterns in employee satisfaction across certain departments, locations, or shifts
- Take proactive steps to improve the employee experience
Mitigate risk and improve compliance
Industries like aviation, healthcare, and manufacturing have strict safety and regulatory requirements. Ensuring that every frontline worker has understood new protocols is crucial.
Frontline analytics can help organizations confirm:
- Who has read policy updates
- Who has completed critical compliance training
- Which teams or individuals may need follow-up support
This minimizes risk and strengthens governance.
Fuel proactive improvement
Analytics isn’t just about looking back – it should drive ongoing improvement. This can cover a range of areas, such as communications, training, and workflows.
For example, many internal communication teams use Unily’s in-depth analytics and AI reporting to reveal not just open rates, but also how long frontline workers spend on a resource and what’s landing well. This helps them iterate and deploy what works – and crucially, this can be done at scale.
Frontline analytics in practice
Our frontline worker research contained some eye-opening insights from particular industries. You can download the report in full to see this, but in this section, we’ll break down the use cases for frontline analytics in some of these industries.
Healthcare
In healthcare, the frontline covers a range of people, from nurses and doctors, to cleaners and receptionists. Frontline analytics can help:
- Monitor burnout through sentiment tracking
- See whether wellbeing resources are being utilized
- Track awareness of new health protocols
- Observe how quickly key information is reaching patient-facing teams
Manufacturing
Factory floor workers operate in complex environments where safety and efficiency are key. Frontline analytics helps:
- Track adherence to safety training
- Correlate training material engagement with incident rates
- Capture real-time feedback on processes or equipment issues
Retail
From sales associates to stockroom staff, retail frontline teams are pivotal to the customer experience. Analytics can:
- Evaluate the effectiveness of new product training or campaign rollouts
- Collect shop floor insights and best practices at speed
- Monitor employee morale during peak seasons
Aviation
Pilots, cabin crew, and ground staff form the operational backbone of aviation. From tarmac to terminal, frontline analytics can help airlines:
- Ensure compliance with ever-changing regulations
- Monitor completion of safety and service training
- See which teams have knowledge gaps
- Gauge employee sentiment around things like schedule changes or operational pressures
How can an Employee Experience Platform support frontline analytics?
While many organizations might recognize the potential of frontline analytics, they often face a critical barrier: the lack of tools to capture frontline data in real-time. Traditional systems are often designed for back-office insights – as opposed to data from workers that are dispersed across locations, devices, roles, and shift patterns.
This is where a modern Employee Experience Platform (EXP) comes into its own. Not only can it be a vehicle for frontline engagement and communications, but it can also be a data capture engine.
Here’s how an EXP can unlock the full power of frontline analytics.
Unifying communication analytics
Frontline employees often miss important updates due to fragmented communication channels – leading to an eye-watering $80 billion cost.
An EXP centralizes all content – whether it’s an operational update or a company announcement – and delivers it through frontline-friendly interfaces such as an employee app and even digital screens.
Examples of things a modern EXP can track include:
- Open and click-through rates for announcements
- Engagement by location, role, or department
- Time spent on critical content
- Content effectiveness comparisons (such as video vs PDF)
This data allows internal communicators to refine their strategies and ensure messages truly reach and resonate with the frontline
Gauging morale in real time
Understanding frontline morale is critical, but traditional surveys are too slow or impersonal for these employees.
With an EXP, you can incorporate things like pulse surveys and anonymous feedback tools into the employee experience – as well as emoji reactions and comment fields for announcements. All of these can help you take a temperature check in real time – which in turn means you can be proactive about any issues there are.
Monitoring training and knowledge
In fast-moving sectors, learning must be ongoing, targeted, and adaptable. But simply rolling out courses isn’t enough – organizations need to know if it’s effective.
A good frontline portal will help you integrate learning content into the everyday workflow. Not only does this increase the chances of people engaging with it, but it tracks key metrics such as:
- Employee onboarding completion
- Course and content completion rates
- Time spent on learning modules
- Drop-off points in training journeys
- Employee feedback on training quality and usefulness
This level of insight helps HR leaders identify skills gaps and optimize training.
British Airways uses Unily’s Employee Journeys feature for its sustainability training initiatives. This enables them to hyper-personalize and automate the learning experience for employees across their lifecycle – embedding it into the frontline workflow.
Providing insightful search metrics
An often-overlooked source of information is how employees use the platform itself – what they search for, which tools they use most, and where they struggle to find information.
When looking for an EXP, ensure it can capture granular behavioral data such as:
- Top searched terms
- Failed searches
- Navigation patterns and most/least used features
- Popular communities or social posts
These will help you identify knowledge gaps and create a more intuitive digital experience that’s built with frontline needs in mind.
Integration with other enterprise systems
Frontline analytics become even more powerful when enriched with data from other platforms. By integrating with existing tools and apps – whether it's Slack, SharePoint, Google, or even a digital noticeboard – a modern EXP creates a more seamless experience all round.
This should be a non-negotiable for any organization, but particularly for enterprises, as they’re likely to have a large tech stack.
Ultimately, these integrations enable a 360-degree view of the frontline workforce.
The key takeaway
Frontline analytics shouldn’t be seen as a luxury, but as a strategic enabler. It's important that those responsible for the employee experience understand what initiatives are resonating, how engaged their frontline is, and where gaps exist.
As enterprises face tighter margins, labor shortages, and rising customer expectations, understanding your frontline workforce – and then optimizing the employee experience for them – is essential.
At Unily, we make frontline data understandable and impactful. Book a demo and find out how our platform helps you turn frontline insights into enterprise-wide transformation.
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