The Global IT Experience Benchmark: H1/2022

Making the case for ITXM

This year, the analyst community is converging towards looking at Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) as higher-level categories, which include multiple sub-categories (or interpretations) related to IT Experience, also referred to as the digital experience in the workplace. 

This evolution is encouraging. It means enterprises looking to build out Experience Management programs can more clearly see how different vendors can cover different aspects of DEX. 

Consensus around the hierarchy and roles of different vendors, concepts and frameworks will help enterprises see beyond marketing terminology and identify what they really need to drive sustainable changes, which lead to more smiles and less time wasted - for both business end-users and IT workers alike. 

HappySignals believes that the old adage of "People, Process, Technology... in that order" is important. Issues that matter with processes or technology will show up in perceived happiness and productivity losses - if they really matter to employees. 

Uncertainty is increasing the importance of understanding what end-users value

Uncertainty in markets can be a great reason to adopt experience-centric practices. The reason being that IT is never isolated from the wider realities in the world economy. Inflation, market insecurity and labor force movement lead to uncertainty. Enterprises are hence looking for ways to ensure stability and continuity. Having real-time IT Experience data that reflects how people feel about IT helps to focus limited resources where it matters. Less waste, more targeted actions. 

If 70% of Digital Transformation projects fail, how can you know which 30% will succeed?

Enterprise level IT operations are complex, and by no means easy to manage. There are very few IT professionals that would say they have all the resources and competencies that they want.

We believe one of the biggest reasons for failed projects are the assumptions they are built on. Without comparable, reliable and repeatable insights about end-user expectations, it is hard to know which projects will be perceived as valuable. Imagine what the cumulative ROI of IT investments would be, if almost every project was a success? 

Only the projects perceived by end-users as being valuable for their work will get adopted and avoid joining the category of failed Digital Transformation projects. That's why IT Experience data is so crucial, and why the right success metrics matter a lot.

XLAs at the center of ITXM

XLACollab found in 2019 that only 2% of people had heard of XLAs. In 2022, that awareness has gone up to 65%, with almost 10% knowing how to implement them. That is a big jump, but leaves over 90% still unsure of how to implement XLAs. 

This contradiction is reflected in the gap between knowledge and sustainable practices in ITXM. Bridging that gap is likely the next frontier in IT Experience Management. We believe enterprise IT can truly benefit from simplifying experience management metrics and practices for wider organisational adoption. (Further reading: The Practical Guide to XLAs)

For HappySignals, our foundational premise is that Experience is inherently Human-Centric. Processes, devices, applications, and network speed are all still part of the picture. But ultimately, only the people who interact with the IT touchpoints can decide if their experience was bad, good, (or great!) This has been our approach since 2014 and our Benchmark report reflects this human-centric approach. 

So if you are a CIO, IT Leader, Experience Owner, or Service Owner wanting to deliver great IT experiences to your end-users in 2022, consider if you really understand how people feel. Technology organically evolves to be bigger, faster and better, but how do the people using those technologies really feel about their experience?

Based on almost 840K end-user responses from January-June 2022 in enterprises that use HappySignals IT Experience Management Platform, this report presents insights about how end-users are experiencing IT, so as to enable you and your team’s work in today’s Experience-centric Enterprise IT landscape.

The Global IT Experience Benchmark H1/2022 Report presents and analyzes data from 839,581 end-user responses collected through the HappySignals IT Experience Management Platform between January-June 2021.

On this webpage, we have mainly included the H1/2022 data and a few selected trends across time (from before H1/2022). To deep dive into more detailed historical data, download the full PDF Report.

Where does the data come from?

Our benchmark data is collected from all HappySignals customers. These include large enterprises, as well as Managed Service Providers (MSP) who use the HappySignals Platform with their customers – enterprises and public sector organizations. 
 
About 60% of HappySignals customers are using Outsourced Service Desk providers. 
 
All responses are from IT end-users – employees using internal IT services – and reflect their feelings and perceptions about IT.
This report shows the findings and analysis that emerged from data about almost 8 million end-user experiences with IT over the last 4 years. 

How is the data gathered?

HappySignals IT Experience Management Platform connects operational data (e.g. from customers’ ITSM platforms) with continuous survey data from end-users about Ticket-based IT and Proactive IT areas.

Ticket-based IT (Incidents and Requests):
End-user responses are collected immediately when tickets are resolved. Surveys are sent after each ticket, asking end-users to accept the resolution by giving feedback about their experience. The average response rate for HappySignals customers is around 30%.

Proactive IT:
Surveys are sent proactively to end-users about Proactive IT areas (e.g. Enterprise Applications, Laptops and Computers, Remote Work), rather than in connection with tickets. These surveys can be scheduled to target relevant end-users at optimal frequencies, enabling continuous measurement of non-ticket-based IT areas.

Data about company-specific classifications:
This report includes some analysis of benchmark data based on company-specific classifications. All benchmark data that concerns classifications by industry, company size, or outsourced vs internal service desks is in an early phase of maturity. Such data was collected manually from our customers, and not via our platform’s continuous data collection.

What data is gathered?

Happiness:
End-users rate how happy they are with the IT area being measured (e.g. recent ticket-based service experience, Enterprise Applications, Mobile Devices, etc) on a scale from 0-10.
HappySignals then calculates: % of 9-10 scores - % of 0-6 scores = Overall Happiness (a number between -100 to 100).

Productivity:
End-users estimate how much work time they lost due to the IT area being measured.

Factors:
End-users select from a list of suggested reasons – which we call Factors – that influenced their Happiness rating. Multiple factors can be selected.

The surveys automatically tailor the factors shown to each end-user depending on what IT area is being measured, and whether the Happiness rating given in the first question was positive, negative, or neutral. Examples of factors include “It was difficult to know where to start” (Ticket-based Services) and “Applications are too slow” (Enterprise Applications).

Key insights

• Service Portal happiness increased from +24* to +32 over the past six months, which reflects the continued effort to improve self-service capabilities for IT end-users among HappySignals customers. 
• Enterprises continue to get better at supporting remote work, with an increase from +69 to +75 in happiness with Remote Work over the past six months. It really looks like Remote Work is as well-supported as in-office work.
• Collaboration with IT is once again the most highly rated IT touchpoint. The average score for Collaboration with IT is 6 points above the overall happiness average!

* Number is different from last report due to data quality improvements

If you’re reading this report, one of your priorities is probably to deliver better Ticket-based IT services for end-users. But how do you do that, and where should you start? This chapter aims to shed light on what our data tells about these questions.

First, let’s recap how we measure end-user experience with Ticket-based IT (Incidents and Requests). HappySignals enables our customers to send surveys to end-users in connection with each ticket resolution, asking end-users to accept the resolution by giving feedback about their experience. The surveys ask questions around these metrics:

Happiness: End-users rate how happy they are with their recent service experience on a scale from 0-10. HappySignals then calculates: % of 9-10 scores - % of 0-6 scores = Overall Happiness (a number between -100 to 100).

Productivity: End-users estimate how much work time they lost due to the service experience.

Factors: End-users select from a list of suggested reasons – which we call Factors – that influenced their Happiness rating: e.g. “Service was slow”, “My ticket was not solved”. Multiple factors can be selected.

To illustrate, one ticket-based experience might receive a Happiness rating of 5, Productivity loss of 2h 35min, due to the Factors “My ticket was not solved” and “Service was slow”.

This chapter analyzes data from 694,370 ticket-based IT experiences by end-users, who are served by IT organizations that use the HappySignals Platform.

2.1 Happiness for IT Incident resolutions stabilized in H1/2022

The upward trend over several years with IT incident resolutions happiness seems to have stabilized. In H2/2021, it reached a record high of +77, and it has remained on that same level. Average perceived lost time with IT incidents is very similar with a marginal increase of 3 minutes, sitting at a perceived lost productivity of 3h 9min with each IT incident. 

The paradox of faster than ever service for most, but average lost time going up. 

When looking more closely at lost time across all incidents, we can see that the distribution of perceived lost time is unevenly represented at both sides of the spectrum. The historical trend shows how this polarization of the speed of service means that tickets that are solved in under 8 hours are solved even faster year after year, but tickets that lead to more than 8 hours of lost time take even longer. 

This explains the paradox of slightly rising average lost times in the last couple of reports. Most end-users are receiving faster IT support with IT incidents, but the ones that do not, have to wait an increasingly long time. This leads to average lost time going up, due to the even longer waiting times for the tickets that lead to more than 8 hours of perceived lost time. 

2.2 Factors: The ‘Why’ behind end-user happiness or unhappiness

To improve ticket-based services, we have to understand the most common factors behind why end-users are unhappy with them. This ability to identify the reasons behind end-users’ reported happiness and lost time is one of the most valuable aspects of HappySignals IT Experience Management Platform.

In the survey sent to end-users in connection with a ticket resolution, we ask them to select from a standardized list of Factors, which were created based on our research with IT end-users. The Factors reflect the most common reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction with Ticket-based IT.

The timing of survey delivery also makes our Factors data more reliable, as it assesses end-users’ feelings about the service at the moment of their experience, rather than for example, months later in a yearly IT survey.

Different factors are presented to end-users to choose from, depending on the happiness rating they give on the 10-point scale. For example, scores from 0-6 are classified as a negative experience, so end-users are asked to select from a list of factors tailored for negative experiences. The same goes for scores from 7-8 (neutral experience), and 9-10 (positive experience). Certain service agent related factors are included in all three scenarios.

End-users can select as many factors as they wish from the list. This is also why the percentages shown in the factors data below add up to over 100%.

With IT incidents for example, 75% of responders who gave a positive happiness rating and selected at least one factor were happy about the speed of service.

Factors that impact end-user happiness with IT incident resolutions

The factors below are standardized across all of our customers, and anonymised for the Benchmark data. 

End-users select the factors after having selected a level of happiness with the IT incident resolution. The score is selected on a scale of 0-10.

The factors are score specific to positive (9-10), neutral (7-8), and negative (0-6) scores. 

What is the business impact of ITXM on IT incident management? 80% of time lost comes from only 12,5% of IT incident tickets. When lost time with incidents is more than 8 hours, the lost time is so much higher that despite it only accounting for a small share of tickets (12,5%), leads to 80% of the total reported lost time by end-users! This is like Pareto's law on steroids!  Once the SLA is breached, it seems the agent doesn't care if it is by 5 minutes or 5 days.  If you consider time to be money, then we recommend having automated mechanism that alerts managers when end-users report losing more than 8 hours of time, to avoid tickets being abandoned the moment the breach SLAs.  With HappySignals ITXM™ Platform, you drill down in one click into Incidents where end-users lost >8h to investigate why.

 

Historical data on Factors end-users chose when having positive, neutral, and negative experiences with IT Incidents

Discover detailed historical data in the PDF Report.

 

2.3 Ticket reassignments impact end-user happiness and productivity significantly

Each additional time a ticket is bounced, happiness falls by close to 8 points, while end-users lose 1h 35min more of their work time.
These add up to 8h 15min lost when tickets were reassigned four times! 

Our data over the last 3 years about the frequency of ticket reassignments, and the Happiness and Lost Time end-users reported for different reassignment counts has remained quite stable with only small variations. Hence, we believe it is a reliable and predictable indicator of the impact of reassignments on end-user happiness and productivity.

What is the business impact of ITXM on ticket reassignments? Ticket reassignments have such a huge impact on end-user happiness and productivity, that it is one of the most important metrics for IT to understand and improve.  Start by identifying the leading causes of ticket reassignments in your organization. Which types of tickets are bounced the most, and why? Can changes or automation be made to get those tickets to the right agents more quickly?  To learn more about reducing excessive ticket bouncing, check out this article. IT organizations can also use HappySignals data on reassignments to build concrete business cases that show the productivity gains that can be achieved by making data-driven improvements to reduce ticket reassignments.

Historical data on Ticket Reassignments

Discover detailed historical data in the PDF Report. 

 

2.4 IT Support Channels

Developing channels is another important area of focus for IT teams in service delivery. To develop your channels in a way that makes employees happier, you need to start from reliable and granular experience data about how different channels are used and perceived by end-users.

Without getting (and using!) that data, IT teams may end up devoting resources to adding new channels for the sake of it and pushing end-users to use them, or improving channels that are already performing well rather than those that need attention.

Usage of different channels for IT Incidents

Our data on channel usage mirrors recent trends in the ITSM industry of developing channels with automation and pre-determined user flows to reduce the number of tickets service desk agents have to handle.

This trend is likely to continue as IT organisations are looking at ways to become more efficient, while improving the overall customer experience. The investments in service portals, smart AI driven chats and proactive monitoring of services with self-healing capabilities all seek to optimise use of technology across different teams. 

Our recommendation is to not lose sight of end-user needs by continuing to monitor how their experience changes, when support channel recommendations and usage is changing. If possible, aim to have an experience data baseline before the change, track changes during the change and establish conclusions by seeing what the experience is a few months after the change has been implemented.

NB! The total percentages do not add up to 100%, as we exclude channel categories that are not possible to reliably fit the existing 5 categories. 

Historical data on Channel Usage

Focus your resources on improving existing channels, not adding new ones

Based on the data from all our customers, there are only slight differences in overall happiness with the digital channels – Chat, Email, Phone, and Portal (all range from +73 to +79). The only channel with significantly higher happiness is Walk-in (+92). The perception of lost time is also by far the lowest for Walk-in IT support, with just 1h 41min on average per incident, 30 minutes less than the second least time-consuming channel, Phone.

We hypothesize that end-users who use the Walk-in channel have much better experiences because talking to a service agent in-person likely results in the problem being resolved then and there. This reduces ticket reassignments and the likelihood of end-users needing to explain their case several times – both of which produce poorer experiences, as discussed in the previous section.

But while Walk-in delivers great service experiences, it is also the most expensive channel for IT to maintain. Many companies have stopped providing Walk-in because of how resource-intensive it is, and understandably so! For large multinational organizations without dedicated IT teams in every operating country, Walk-in will also be inaccessible to many employees. Hence, promoting Walk-in over digital channels isn’t a sustainable approach either.

Historical data on Channel Happiness and Lost Time for IT Incidents

2.5 Different Support Profiles have different service expectations and channel preferences

While in previous sections we have discussed the experiences of IT end-users as a whole with various aspects of the IT service process, there are also behavioral and motivational differences between end-users. Understanding these differences is key to tailoring your IT services for different types of end-users.

This is where HappySignals IT Support Profiles come in handy.

Based on interviews with over 500 end-users, we found two main behavioral drivers to have the greatest impact on end-user behavior and experience: Competence (how capable the end-user is of fixing IT problems independently), and Attitude (how willing the end-user is to solve the problem independently).

Mapping differences in these two drivers, we defined four Support Profiles: Doer, Prioritizer, Trier, and Supported. Learn more in our Guide on using Profiles in IT Service Desk.

Doers are still the most critical, Supported remain the easiest to please

Consistent with previous years, Doers again have the lowest Happiness of +73, while Supported are still the happiest with Happiness of +84.

Why have these patterns remained so stable? We have several hypotheses.

Since Doers are both capable and willing to solve most IT problems by themselves, they likely only raise tickets when faced with complex problems. Such problems are naturally also harder for service agents to solve quickly, making it harder to get good experience scores with Doers. As technically capable end-users, they may also be more demanding of service quality and speed.

As for the Supported, they are neither competent nor eager to solve IT problems on their own and just want someone to help them out. They may be less demanding of IT services, resulting in higher Happiness ratings on average. They may also raise tickets even for simple issues which are easy for agents to solve, producing smoother service experiences.

Does each Support Profile prefer different support channels?

It is fascinating to notice how different support profiles gravitate towards different channels, in a way that confirms the behavioral drivers identified in our original research about IT Support Profiles! The data on IT incident channel usage by different profiles highlights the following patterns:

Doers, who like fixing issues themselves, are by far the most avid users of self-service Portals and the least likely to use Phone.

Prioritizers on the other hand, use Phone more frequently than other support profiles, which fits their profile of wanting problems solved with minimal participation – a 'someone should do it for me' attitude.

Supported and Triers use Walk-in IT support 30-35% more frequently than Doers and Prioritizers, which is in line with their preference for personal help that enables them to learn, from service personnel that are patient with them.

We recommend downloading our Definitive Guide on IT Support Profiles for more information about how you can tailor your services to better serve different end-users in the organisation. 

2.6 A brief look at IT Requests

Key insights

• End-user Happiness has continued to increase for the fourth half-year period in a row. However, perceived lost time has very slightly decreased in our latest numbers.
  
  

• For the second time, lost time is higher for IT Requests in Email than Portal.
  
  • Happiness with requests submitted via Portal has steadily improved, while lost time with requests submitted via Email has gotten worse.
  • The increase in lost time through Email is also reflected in lower end-user happiness.

• New channels are being used
  • In the last 6 months, more than 20% of IT Requests have been submitted through channels that are not reflected in our benchmark data. These have been categorized as “Other”.
  • These “Other” channels are mostly a matter of non-standard configurations in the ITSM tools, but also new more experimental support channels. 
    
    

Key insights

End-users in finance are 26% happier with IT services than end-users in IT companies. Finance is among the most regulated industries and IT happiness might reflect stability of processes and ways of working. It is also the sector where the expression "time is money" is most likely to ring true as a core value. The perception of lost time with IT incidents in Finance is significantly lower than any of the other industries in the selected industries. 

The fact that end-users in IT companies are the most demanding does not come as a huge surprise. Employees in IT companies are more likely to be technically-skilled Doers who can solve simpler IT issues by themselves. Hence, they go to IT support with more complex problems, and have more demanding expectations of the resolution process. This is reflected by the highest amount of perceived lost time with IT incidents in any of our industry verticals.  

3.3 Happiness with Internal vs Outsourced Service Desks

HappySignals tracks how different organizations who use our platform are able to improve end-user experiences through experience management. We do this by comparing end-user happiness in our customers’ first two months of using HappySignals (baseline before they have made any improvements), with the happiness now.

While internal IT service desks start at higher levels of happiness, outsourced IT on average manage to improve the experience more. Our latest data shows that internal service desks have improved IT happiness by 19%, while outsourced service desks have increased the happiness by 36%. 

Keep in mind however, that this report is only based on data from HappySignals customers. In our customer base the bigger the organization, the more likely it is that the organization has outsourced their service desk:

• Amongst companies with fewer than 5000 employees, only 33% have outsourced their service desk.
• Amongst companies with more than 5000 employees, as many as 73% have outsourced their service desk.
  
  

   

  Business impact of ITXM in Outsourced IT Provider relations? Experience Management does not mean you need more people. It means provider and customer can together allocate resources to areas where they create the most value. Using IT Experience Management practices in Outsourced IT provider relations provides a shared view of IT experience between the enterprise and the IT provider. This leads to a shift in focus from SLAs to end-users. The Watermelon Effect, where IT metrics look green on the outside but the experience of end-users is poor, has historically been more common with outsourced IT providers. When focus is shifted to end-user experience, we have observed that outsourced IT Service providers are good at becoming systematic in using the experience data. If you recognize a disconnect between what your outsourced IT service providers metrics show, and the experience the employees using those service are reporting, it could be time to adopt IT Experience Management practices.  This will both lead to happier end-users, but also less time lost with IT issues across different touchpoints.  The thing that is often forgotten when talking about Experience Management is how it helps IT providers' teams do better work. There are two main things that change 1) Agents and team leads get more motivated because their work feels more like helping people, rather than just closing tickets.  2) Delivery becomes more efficient as IT gets better at focusing on what matters for people.

   

3.4 IT Happiness in different Global Regions

Like in previous reports, we continue to observe cultural differences in how end-users perceive IT services and lost time. For example, end-users in Western Europe rate IT Services lower than Eastern Europe, despite reporting less lost time with Ticket-based IT.

This region-specific data tells an interesting story: The happiest countries are also the countries that report the highest time losses with ticket-based IT. 

To us, this underlines the fact that end-users in some cultural contexts are more demanding and expect faster service than in others.

Book a meeting with the report authors, if you wish to discuss country specific differences.

Enterprises continue to get better at supporting employees in remote work. Happiness with Remote Work increased from +60 to +75 over the past year.

However, we cannot make direct comparisons between the factors influencing happiness with Remote Work in H1/2021 and H2/2021 in this report. This is because HappySignals changed the factors included in our Remote Work survey in H1/2021.

Looking only at the H2/2021 data however, end-users made more evenly distributed selections between the given Remote Work factors, as compared to for Ticket-based IT. In other words, no specific factors stand out as dominant influencers of end-user happiness or unhappiness with remote work.

In this report, we have analyzed our global benchmark data from different angles to present a holistic snapshot of end-user experiences in the Era of Experience. As emphasized repeatedly however, all the data used in this report is from HappySignals customers – i.e. enterprises that have decided to take a human-centric approach to managing experiences.

The broader story told by the data is hence of IT Experience Management empowering Enterprise IT leaders to drive data-driven change, achieve outcomes in employee happiness and productivity, and transform the culture of IT to be more human-centric.

Continue learning with more resources

Intrigued? Discover experience management by reading the IT Experience Management Framework (ITXM™) Guide. This downloadable 10-page read introduces ITXM™ and how to lead human-centric IT operations with experience as a key outcome.

Do you prefer learning through short video courses? Check out ITXM.academy, where in about 1 hour, you can learn the foundations of IT Experience Management and get certified for free. 

If you enjoyed this report, you may also want to visit our Learning Center for bite-sized videos and blog posts about topics from XLAs to optimizing your ServiceNow.