Since its inception, the goal of the IT helpdesk has been to investigate and resolve employees’ technical issues as swiftly as possible, since IT doesn’t know about most issues unless employees make that phone call. And one of the key metrics is Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) per ticket, in addition to first call resolution, ticket volume, call duration, calls per person per day, and ticket backlog. But however fast the IT helpdesk responds, by the time an employee encounters a problem and raises a ticket, their day has already been significantly impacted. In this sense, each ticket represents a frustrated worker and a productivity failure for the business.
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Taken cumulatively, the cost of these issues is enormous for both the business as well as IT. For large enterprises, it’s not unusual for employees in totality to spend tens of millions of hours dealing with IT services, trying to get their devices and applications working as needed. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that a recent Nexthink survey found that 72% of IT workers expected the helpdesk as it is currently constituted to be gone by 2027 with the realization that this model is no longer scalable or sustainable. But phasing out the helpdesk is only the start – what comes next? And what should businesses do to prepare for it?
MTTR Zero
The core problem with the helpdesk today is that it is reactive. Without visibility into the digital employee experience, support staff must wait for tickets to come in before being able to take action. But that model is dead, as evidenced by the 87% of IT workers say that without significant proactive capabilities, the IT helpdesk will soon be rendered ‘economically unsustainable’.
Instead, the future of IT services will involve proactively hunting out areas where employees are being impacted by poor digital experiences as job number one, and then employing AI and automation earlier in the release cycle to prevent these issues from occurring at all. By using early warning detection analytics and machine learning pattern spotting, IT teams gain far greater visibility into the issues facing the enterprise, enabling the deployment of automated and scalable remediations, targeted self-service options, and preventative measures that avoid the disruption from ever happening.
Amongst IT workers, this shift is seen as inevitable, as reflected by the fact that 92% believe the IT service desk would be better renamed as the IT experience desk, and with 95% of companies already investing proactive capabilities. Importantly, this near-unanimous mindset shift doesn’t signal a reduced need for support staff. In fact, nearly two-thirds (64%) say that proactive capabilities will likely increase headcount in these areas. Instead, it shows the evolution of the practice with reactive resources reducing and staff evolving into something more holistic and strategic.
AI, automation, and reskilling
So how should businesses prepare for the transition from the traditional helpdesk to the experience desk? One vital element that should not be overlooked is that technology alone is the only part of the solution. In fact, I believe the technology is the easy part – it’s the people that are hard. While it’s important for IT teams to have tools and capabilities that can provide holistic visibility and actionable insights into the digital employee experience, those platforms have to be married with reskilling and rethinking initiatives that enable employees to act on the data they provide.
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Already, IT support workers are investing significant amounts of time in updating their skillsets as part of this evolution. When asked, 75% said they were deepening their understanding of the user experience, with the same percentage saying they were developing their generative AI capabilities. Similar proportions are currently improving their technological instruction design (74%) and cybersecurity (70%) abilities.
However, if the transition to the experience desk is to be successful, upskilling cannot be left to motivated individuals alone. Organizations need to make sure that they are providing a comprehensive set of resources and giving employees sufficient time to make use of them, to properly equip themselves for the coming changes. At minimum, this should include a strategy in place to identify the most important skills gaps, a clear career roadmap for every upskilled employee, and access to relevant certification programs. And these skills should also include soft skills that emphasize compassion, empathy, and communications to augment the traditional technical skills.
One step at a time
Finally, although this evolution is both essential and inevitable, it’s also important that organizations don’t attempt to do so overnight. Shifting from reactive to proactive, and finally preventative IT support, needs to be done mindfully and strategically so that employees are not negatively impacted by the change.
Consequently, the process should have clear goals, outcomes, milestones and metrics – for example the phasing out of L1 support and a halving of the number of employee-generated tickets received within a two-year period – at every step of the journey. Crucially, these should be tied to the wider business objectives and company goals to help demonstrate the value of the experience desk to other departments and executives.
Coupled with this, the roll out of automated, self-service support should be small-scale and targeted to begin with. For example, push notifications when employees need to reset their passwords, reboot their devices, or clean up their hard drives, so that IT can get some quick wins under their belt while simultaneously learning lessons for larger projects.
Ultimately, the productivity burden of a reactive helpdesk is too high a cost for modern businesses to bear. As a result, the shift towards a more proactive model – whether it’s called the experience desk or something else – is inevitable. The days of depending on employees to call for help after IT causes a disruption are dying, going the way of the Blackberry, the Zune, the CRT, and the floppy disk. And IT workers themselves are already upskilling and reskilling in preparation for the transition. So, for businesses, the only real question left is whether they want to be an experience leader or an experience laggard.
