Pandemic highlights lack of resilience in ITSM

Ticket volumes rose and customer satisfaction fell as a result of the shift to remote work - AI may be a solution

Support services are essential to smooth IT operations, but the effects of the coronavirus pandemic caused ticket volumes to rise, resolution rate to fall and employee and customer satisfaction to crumble.

Data gathered from more than 400 global companies via MetricNet, and analysed by IT service management (ITSM) company DeepCoding, highlights the sector's lacks resilience and inability to scale to meet demand, causing satisfaction levels to plummet even as ticket volumes.

Monthly ticket volumes increased 35 per cent last year due to the switch to home working. Remote employees have required increased IT support to handle their daily work, and the higher pressure on technicians, as well as the demands of their own home lives, caused rising absenteeism - more than doubling in 2020, from 5.6 per cent pre-pandemic to 11.3 per cent.

Click here to read Delta's IT service desk research

At the same time, the average cost to handle each service desk ticket increased 30 per cent, from $20.44 to $26.51, and the mean time to resolve a ticket rose from 6.2 hours to 9.7. It should be no surprise that, as well as customer satisfaction falling by almost 10 per cent, employee job satisfaction fell: from 76.8 per cent to 67.1 per cent.

DeepCoding says the figures should act as a 'harsh wake-up call' to the industry. Founder and CEO Sebastien Adjiman commented:

"Our analysis indicates that the COVID pandemic has been detrimental to the ITSM sector, which has witnessed a significant rise in costs and a corresponding decline in the quality of service. In this climate, corporates cannot afford to deploy the ostrich technique. This is a business critical issue and one where a swift and cost effective solution is required to improve standards and scalability whilst reducing cost per ticket."

Source: Computing Delta

AI could be a solution to address these issues. Delta's IT service desk research shows that AI is only seen as a value-added feature today, less important than things like ticket management and live chat. However, about half of IT leaders think it will be the next big addition to the ITSM industry. Automating tasks could enable IT teams to process many more service requests (chat bots are an early example); and beyond that, AI has the potential to enable more intelligent decision systems.