Our experience management platform’s insights have long helped our customers improve their IT operations and business outcomes. The shared aggregated data has also provided the IT industry with valuable end-user statistics such as happiness levels and the average employee lost time with incidents. However, the latest insights from The Global IT Experience Benchmark: H1/2022 offer a new perspective to anyone responsible for corporate IT support – that 80% of employee perceived lost productivity is caused by just 12,6% of tickets (as shown in the graphic below).
Source: HappySignals, The Global IT Experience Benchmark: H1/2022
The graphic also shows that 68,6% of tickets account for just 6% of employee perceived lost productivity.
Please keep reading for more details on this lost-productivity disparity and what this means.
The power of experience measurement
If your IT organization is like the many others we help, it will have a wide range of IT service management (ITSM) metrics. Many of which are focused on the IT service desk. They’re probably best practice metric areas and, hopefully, your IT service desk is consistently achieving its performance targets. This provides a “sea of green” on the IT service desk performance dashboard (or in reports), but for some reason, employees or end-users still aren’t happy with the service and support they receive from IT.
This performance gap is the service level agreement (SLA) “watermelon effect” that’s increasingly discussed (as the cause of IT issues) where, while green on the outside, there’s red hidden on the inside. Importantly, this red is seen by end-users, but the IT service provider is blind to it thanks to the employed metrics and the limited insight they offer.
Consequently, organizations are increasingly looking to employee experience measures to understand IT performance better, moving from what has traditionally been a supply-side, point-of-creation view to understanding the demand-side, point-of-consumption perspective. The experience data showing that 80% of employees perceived lost productivity is caused by just 13% of tickets is a great example of this.
Looking beyond averages to see more valuable trends
One of the key statistics we’ve shared with the IT industry for the last half-decade is the employee perceived lost productivity average. This average is across all of our customers (long-term and new) and includes all end-user feedback on IT incident handling. For H1/2022, this figure was three hours and 9 minutes, i.e. across all of the pieces of end-user feedback, employees perceived that they lost an average of three hours and 9 minutes.
This average has many uses. For example, customers can see where they are relative to peers, and the perceived lost productivity is dropping as they improve their IT support capabilities (and the experiences they deliver) over time. Non-customers can also benefit from understanding that employees feel they lose so much productivity, while traditional IT service desk metrics show that incident tickets are being closed in line with agreed SLA targets. It’s a valuable insight that helps everyone.
This new analysis now delivers an insight that has likely been unknown to IT service desks for the last three decades – that the spread of lost productivity levels is imbalanced, and very few end-users are “at the average.”
This imbalance is shown in the graphic below. It details the spread of employee perceived lost productivity between 2019 and 2022 based on close to eight million pieces of end-user feedback.
Source: HappySignals, The Global IT Experience Benchmark: H1/2022
There’s a high level of incidents with only 15, 30, or 45 minutes of perceived lost productivity, with 69% of interactions losing the end-user less than an hour’s productivity. But if the end-user doesn’t sit in the 69%, with an hour or less perceived lost productivity, they will likely lose more than a day.
It’s again important to reiterate that the average doesn’t reflect the typical level of lost productivity. This data is unlike a normal or Gaussian distribution, where there’s a hump in the middle, and there are not many tickets that actually had three hours of perceived lost productivity. It’s also essential to understand that end-users report their perceived lost time using a non-linear scale. This scale starts with the greater granularity of choice, as is shown on the graphic’s x-axis (the feedback scale can be seen in this demo feedback form).
The big question(s) for IT support organizations (and the IT industry as a whole)
What are the 13% of tickets that are causing the 80%? And are we – either individually or collectively – focused on the 13% enough?
The main issues here are:
- The 13% and its impact are hidden for most, if not all, organizations
- Without this insight, the 13% can’t be understood and addressed.
We need to analyze the data more to better understand the cause of the 13% across our customers, but we do have some thoughts about possible root causes.
The first is that when SLA targets are breached, perhaps due to the involved complexity, the focus moves to the tickets still within the target. This cause might be a service-provider policy or related to service desk agent motivation, with them dropping the now-breached ticket to focus on the tickets that will allow them to meet their personal and team targets. So, it’s simply a case of the SLA targets driving a certain type of agent behavior.
A second potential cause is that there are more reassignments between resolution groups, especially for more complicated tickets. This cause can include tickets being routed to third-party support providers, which further adds to the resolution delay (with the SLA clock potentially paused when the resolution is not under the IT service desk’s control). Our customers and we have long known the adverse impact of ticket reassignment on end-user happiness and productivity. In the latest Global IT Experience Benchmark Report, each reassignment causes happiness to drop by close to 8 points, and end-users think they lose one hour and 35 minutes of productivity.
A third idea is something that is often associated with “aged tickets” – communication “breakdowns.” This cause is, for example, when the IT service desk requires more information from an end-user. They leave a voice message or send the end-user an email and “stop the clock.” Sadly the end-user doesn’t see or act upon the request promptly, and maybe multiple times, and perceives the time taken to be excessive. The IT service desk, on the other hand (and thanks to the “clock stopping,” is still seen as handing the incident within the agreed SLA target. Hence, there’s no issue from the service-provider perspective. This cause might be even less visible when “three strikes and close” policies are applied to non-responsive end-users’ tickets. While “aged ticket” volumes are reduced, the employee experience is, too (and a new ticket is commonly opened to progress the issue when the end-user follows up).
No matter the root cause(s)…
While more needs to be done to understand why the 13% exists, your organization must have the ability to identify its 13%. It might have sight of “aged tickets” and address these periodically (meaning months of lost time, not days). But how much insight is lost through “clock stopping” and automated ticket closure? The bottom line – is this situation a significant cause of end-user dissatisfaction with IT that’s hidden by IT policies and practices?
Think about it. All of the improvements that your IT organization and IT service desk have implemented to date and have planned for 2023, are they focused on the simpler issues where end-users are already happy with the level of their lost productivity?
So, if you really want to create additional value for your business, find out what the 13% of delayed tickets are and then focus on them. This action could be improvement initiatives or simply prioritizing these tickets in terms of IT service desk focus.
Sadly, as service consumers, we remember the poor experiences far more and for longer than the good ones. And by proactively identifying and addressing the 13% of tickets (that lose end-users so much productivity), whatever the cause, your IT organization can take positive steps in closing the gap between service-provider and service-receiver perceptions. It might be that the quicker ticket resolutions lengthen slightly as a result of this focus. Still, the overall impact on business performance and IT’s reputation will likely be better for all.
For me, personally, this is probably the most important finding in the history of HappySignals experience data collection and analysis. This new insight should challenge the whole IT industry’s perspective of IT support and whether we’re focused on improving the right things.
Get your free copy of the latest The Global IT Experience Benchmark Report.
By Sami Kallio