Ivanti Originals
Audio versions of original Ivanti research on IT, security and the future of work. Visit ivanti.com/research for additional media, including presentation-ready slides and downloadable charts and graphs.
Ivanti Originals
Elevating the IT Service Management Experience
Ivanti’s latest research — a study of over 15,500 unique executive leaders, IT professionals, security professionals and office workers around the globe — finds that inefficient workflows and insufficient data make it difficult to deliver high-quality IT service experiences. Help desks are struggling under massive workloads and not prioritizing end-user experience.
The research shows a surprisingly low number of service desks are tracking end-user experience metrics. Moreover, companies lack an integrated IT tech stack to oversee and optimize service desk performance, and many organizations don’t offer the self-service tools and capabilities employees want to solve their own tech issues.
Ivanti’s report, “Elevating the IT Service Management Experience,” offers expert insights for how organizations leverage data, automation and strategic integrations to rethink and transform service desk efficiency and experience.
Get more resources
To read the report and access additional media, including presentation-ready slides and downloadable charts and graphs, visit ivanti.com/itsm-experience.
For more Ivanti research on IT, security and the future of work, visit ivanti.com/research.
About Ivanti
Ivanti elevates and secures Everywhere Work so that people and organizations can thrive. We make technology work for people, not the other way around. Today’s employees use a wide range of corporate and personal devices to access IT applications and data over multiple networks to stay productive wherever and however they work. Ivanti is one of the only technology companies that finds, manages and protects each IT asset and endpoint in an organization. Over 40,000 customers, including 88 of the Fortune 100, have chosen Ivanti to help them deliver an excellent digital employee experience and improve IT and security team productivity and efficiency. At Ivanti, we strive to create an environment where all perspectives are heard, respected and valued, and we are committed to a more sustainable future for our customers, partners, employees and the planet. For more information, visit ivanti.com and follow @GoIvanti.
Help desks are struggling under massive workloads and not prioritizing end-user experience. Research from Ivanti shows how organizations can leverage data, automation and strategic integrations to rethink and transform service desk efficiency and experience.
You’re listening to the audio version of Elevating the IT Service Management Experience, part of Ivanti’s digital experience research series. To see more Ivanti research and to access additional media, including presentation-ready slides and downloadable charts and graphs, visit ivanti, I-V-A-N-T-I.com/research.
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Part one: Automation
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Problem today
IT service desk management (ITSM) workflows are overly manual and cumbersome.
Nearly half (47%) of office workers still use the phone to contact the service desk — one of many pressure points for IT support.
Consider that Ivanti’s study finds office workers interact with the service desk 3x per month. When these interactions are manual and inefficient — as with phone contacts — it places an undue burden on IT.
Nearly 1 in 4 IT professionals (23%) say a colleague has resigned due to burnout.
Your frontline service desk employees need relief.
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Why it matters
Automation can dramatically optimize workflows, drive efficiency for IT professionals and reduce IT burnout … all while maintaining or improving employee experience.
Yet a large portion of organizations don’t use it. Today, just 46% use service desk ticket automation, and only 41% automate onboarding.
The service desk is hungry for these types of solutions! 95% of IT professionals call automations “very” or “somewhat necessary” to be efficient at their jobs.
What does service desk automation do?
Automates common service requests and workflows such as password resets, basic troubleshooting and onboarding of new employees.
It uses intelligent ticket routing to categorize and assign tickets based on experience and expertise or resolve tickets automatically with no human input.
It deploys automations, scripts and knowledge management to up-level help desk skills and speed throughput.
And it figures out where proactive solutions can reduce overall ticket traffic — solving future problems that have not yet entered the ticket queue.
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Part two: Measurement
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Problem today
The research shows a surprisingly low number of service desks are tracking end-user experience metrics.
Tracking employees’ helpdesk experiences is crucial to guide improvement — be it workflow and process optimization, employee engagement or business outcomes.
Yet Ivanti’s research found the following surprisingly low tracking rates among IT professionals:
48% track Digital Employee Experience, or DEX scores, 39% track speed of ticket resolution and 24% track Customer Satisfaction aka CSAT scores.
Tracking and optimizing metrics like speed of resolution and CSAT scores should be standard best practice — so these figures present a worrying signal.
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Why it matters
Organizations are not using ITSM functionality to connect help desk performance and employee experience.
Companies must take a more holistic, user-focused look at help desk performance. Here “performance” is not simply about measuring throughput or efficiency, but also about delivering valuable, positive, scalable experiences.
Metrics like “speed of ticket resolution” uncover whether the organization is spending help desk resources efficiently — an important variable to manage. But resolution speed is about much more. Tracking speed of ticket resolution also helps organizations reduce employee wait times and frustration with the service desk (which in turn lessens use of security workarounds, unsanctioned software or shortcuts or other negative behaviors).
It helps decrease IT teams’ workloads and stress levels.
It helps understand how automation improves throughput.
And it helps boost employee engagement and support for IT and security practices.
Despite these upsides, only 39% use ticket resolution metrics to evaluate employee experience.
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Part three: Integrated ITSM
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Problem today
Companies lack an integrated IT tech stack to oversee and optimize service desk performance and experience.
Without integration, data is stuck in silos, and critical insights remain inaccessible.
For example, today only 53% use real-time user or telemetry data to manage digital employee experience — a big missed opportunity. IT teams need access to telemetry data across systems, applications, users and devices to make data-driven, informed decisions.
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Why it matters
When companies integrate their IT tech stack, they can uncover powerful insights and deploy time-saving automations.
Visibility is table stakes for optimizing help desk performance. Beyond visibility, an integrated tech stack unleashes opportunities for automation and service improvements: intelligent ticket routing, automated workflows, improved service delivery.
Your IT teams want this. Among IT professionals, 1 in 3 say their organization doesn’t have the right tools to proactively remediate end-user issues.
The end goal: Make the service delivery process manageable and scalable.
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Part four: Self-service
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Problem today
Employees often want to solve their own IT problems, but many companies don’t offer the tools or oversight to make self-service effective.
Office workers are just as likely to seek help from a colleague as they are to contact the service desk when they have a question or problem.
Among employees who prefer to ask a coworker or the internet for help with their tech issues, 62% say they choose this route because they believe it’s faster than contacting the help desk.
Yet many companies don’t offer a formal self-service option.
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Why it matters
When IT self-service paths are ad hoc, they are not recorded in the ITSM system — meaning some employees’ IT problems fly permanently under the radar.
Given that a large share of employees like to fix their IT problems themselves (45%), the self-service option should be an integral part of a managed experience.
And the opportunities for self-service IT support are massive — including everything from password reset portals and software download centers, to robust knowledge bases, help desk chatbots and automated onboarding/offboarding.
Capturing this hidden information improves service quality, because tracking incidents that were resolved by an employee helps identify common issues and improve a company’s knowledge base.
It helps IT teams better allocate resources by understanding which common problems can be solved by employees themselves.
And data about self-service usage — and its effectiveness — can guide important decisions about IT investments, training and tools.
The issue is particularly salient now, as companies grapple with how to offer a consistent experience to all employees — no matter where or when they work. Robust self-service options can be particularly valuable by enabling employees working remotely to access help 24/7.
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Part five: Action steps
Experts weigh in on how organizations can reimagine IT service management.
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Rethink — and dramatically broaden — the role of ITSM within your organization, says Bob Grazioli, Ivanti’s CIO.
I view ITSM as a center of gravity within the organization. It’s important that CIOs move away from thinking of ITSM as a ticketing system. It is much, much more. Think about the new-hire experience, for example. ITSM automates their onboarding, manages the employees’ assets, tracks their experience and ensures they are getting the right services.
Now, let’s think about how this works at the organizational level. Your ITSM tracks assets, manages tickets and analyzes the performance of the IT environment. All of this generates massive amounts of information: data about products, devices and users — piles of telemetry data. We gather that information and let it flow through different platforms and tools — all from ITSM — and let those insights inform decision making, drive automation and power workflows and services.
By integrating various IT functions into ITSM, organizations can create a more cohesive and efficient IT environment, ultimately leading to improved employee satisfaction and productivity. ITSM is essentially the focal point of how you will manage IT going forward.
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Bob goes on to say that IT teams should leverage AI and automation to reduce the IT workload and make service management more efficient.
At Ivanti, we’ve developed a series of automations around ticket processing, categorization, routing and remediation — and we’ve seen dramatic impacts.
By routing tickets to the right group in seconds — not minutes or days — we are speeding up the help desk triage process. And now we’re taking it a step further by using AI to identify what can be remediated automatically and immediately, without a human intervening in any way.
A simple example of this is letting employees reset their own passwords using a bot. And another more interesting use case is that Ivanti now uses an AI to comb through our internal knowledge base and ticket history and identify where a particular problem has occurred before. Then, the AI looks at whether a patch or some other remediation can be applied to fix the issue — all done automatically. These types of autonomous interventions are driving great productivity gains, which lets us use freed-up help desk resources to focus IT productivity in other areas.
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Define which DEX metrics are most important for IT to measure and optimize, says Sterling Parker, Ivanti’s SVP of Global Technical Support.
To optimize service delivery and improve overall ITSM experience — IT leaders should focus on five areas.
The first is telemetry data: Key telemetry indicators include device age, processor speeds and battery degradation. Tracking these empowers IT to address potential issues quickly, even before the employee is aware of an issue.
The second is support-related measures: The number of open incidents — and whether this variable is trending up or down — is critical. Time to resolution and effort scores (i.e., ease of getting help and reaching a solution) are also helpful to gauge the effectiveness of IT support.
The third is customer satisfaction: CSAT scores are a priority metric to track and manage customer interactions with the service desk.
The fourth is application performance: Load times and errors are vital metrics for mission-critical applications.
And the fifth is security metrics: Vulnerability scan data and anti-malware version information are important for maintaining a strong service posture.
With this information, IT teams can make informed decisions about how to improve outcomes — whether by automating a workflow to speed up resolution times or using intelligent ticket routing to ensure complex issues are assigned correctly to an individual with the right expertise.
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