IT teams adapted to remote working in 2021 really well, so much so that they responded and resolved employee tickets 23 per cent faster than the year before whilst the overall resolution time for IT tickets went down by seven hours.
This is according to the ‘Freshservice Service Management Benchmark‘ report, the findings of which have recently been published by the Indian software company Freshworks Inc.
The report measured key performance indicators (KPIs) for the IT industry across 62 million tickets in 2021 and analysed anonymous, aggregated data from 86 countries, more than 4,200 organisations, and over 62 million unique employee support tickets.
An IT ticket is a general term that refers to a record of completed and to be completed tasks that fall under the remit of an organisation’s IT teams. Such tasks might include mitigating issues and resolving user requests, and overall go towards supporting a company’s tech infrastructure.
In a world where employees increasingly rely on technology to get their work done at home, in the office and everywhere in between, the report confirmed that the arrival of new technologies, such as chatbots and virtual agents, are making a substantial impact in helping employees and companies become more productive.
“Making sure IT works flawlessly is essential for modern businesses to succeed,” said Prasad Ramakrishnan, CIO of Freshworks.
“Analysing data from around the world, we found that IT teams mastered the challenges of remote work last year in large part by employing powerful yet easy-to-use technologies that help them do more, faster.
“Importantly, these technologies are also engaging employees at work, which is critical to help companies retain talent and grow.”
New tech features including AI-powered responses played a significant role in speeding up resolutions as bots deflected nearly 60 per cent of tickets.
Companies that leveraged automation achieved resolution times 22 per cent faster than those that did not, and companies offering a catalogue of IT services through their IT service management (ITSM) software reduced resolution times by 17 per cent compared to those who did not.
Companies are taking notice and rapidly adopting more advanced technologies. Nearly a quarter of integrations included bots and workflow applications, representing a 40 per cent increase since 2020.
While less than one per cent of IT interactions were via chat, this channel provided significant benefits. In some cases, employees who chatted with virtual agents saw customer satisfaction scores hit 100 per cent while delivering 48 per cent faster responses (5.21 hours) and 62 per cent faster resolution times (8.74 hours) compared to those who don’t use virtual agents.
Regional differences
Notably, the report found that North American IT departments achieved the highest customer satisfaction rating at 97.92 per cent.
However, it takes multiple interactions to resolve employee queries, leading to the longest average resolution time in the world at 24.27 hours.
Conversely, companies in Latin America are the quickest to assign tickets and respond to customer issues within 8.24 hours and 7.60 hours, respectively.
