The state of IT service management in 2023

Welcome to The Great Software Reset. Whether the economy is booming or flatlining, the old era of big budgets for bad software is ending—paving the way for the era of efficiency. It’s time to buy only what you need and stop overspending on bad software. 

The Great Software Reset is changing the way companies do business. They’re putting their people first and migrating to technology that employees of a newer generation actually like using—easy-to-use software that helps them do a job better in a faster, digitally-driven market. 

This, in turn, is changing IT priorities. Businesses continue to rely on IT leaders to improve the quality and reliability of IT services while adopting technologies like AI and delivering with fewer resources.

To quantify the impact of deploying modern IT service management techniques and technologies, Freshworks analyzed over 118 million internal IT Service Management (ITSM) tickets across nearly 7,500 organizations to create the 2023 version of the Freshworks Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report.

Here are the top five trends that are shaping the industry today and impacting businesses across the globe:

Trend #1: automation can slash resolution times

IT workers are burnt out, and the labor shortage is real. Businesses are looking at using AI-driven automation to help eliminate the wasteful and mundane tasks employees do, so they can focus on higher-order work. This helps keep productivity moving and keep employees motivated.

Consider the repetitive task of resetting passwords each time an employee has forgotten theirs. There is no back-and-forth conversation needed between reps and employees in this case. Employees just need to follow a series of steps to reset their password—something that automation can solve easily.

The data shows that automation helps companies solve 80% of tickets in the first interaction for tasks like the above. Imagine this—only two out of 10 tickets will need more than one interaction to bring them to closure. 

Automation doesn’t just help by resolving most tickets in the first interaction, but IT teams also see a ~23% dip in resolution time by automating tasks like the one above. 

Overall, automation doesn’t just save time but also enhances the overall customer experience with instant and precise responses.

Trend #2: effortless ITSM with game-changing bots 

Most of us use a collaborative chat app at work every day. Imagine an automated bot on this channel that can help you get things done instantly—requests, approvals, and status updates, all from the same app. 

True to their nature of getting things done, bots, when used in IT Service Management, help companies achieve excellent results. 

One example is Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust in the United Kingdom, which uses automation and hopes to bring in bots to free up clinician time, ensuring most of their time is spent treating patients.

“The positive feedback we get to hear from both our frontline staff and our agents is gratifying,” says Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of ICT, Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust. “We continue to focus on automation and simplifying the process of service requests and delivery. Our next objective is to introduce alternatives such as voice-based alerts and chatbots, thereby doing away with the need to login to the support portal to raise tickets.”According to the report, when a customer first raises a ticket, bots have halved the time it takes to give a first response. Once the first response has been registered, bots help IT teams provide quick resolutions to recurring IT requests, thereby cutting down resolution times by 57%. A dip in resolution time means customers can get back to work sooner, leading to higher productivity.

Trend #3: AI-powered service

Today’s technology enables AI to power AI agents and also turn all your human agents into support superheroes.

AI can drive conversational support using AI agents. For example, employees can just use their commonly used messaging channel to request dashboard access. An AI-powered AI agent can handle the request instantly—it’ll be like just another chat on the messaging channel. 

AI agents enable faster resolutions for customers and free up more time for their human counterparts to work on more complex queries. The report data shows that with AI agents, IT teams can deflect 46% of tickets—meaning almost half the tickets raised can be tackled by AI agents.AI isn’t limited to just AI agents, though. For example, let’s say an employee is unable to access a dashboard even after being given permission to do so. 

Human agents can quickly respond and resolve tickets using AI to automatically identify and associate the dashboard access issue with similar incidents. With the help of AI, agents can answer queries 23% faster.

By resolving queries faster, the agent is more productive and is able to work through more queries. This helps scale up service desks and resolve a much higher volume of queries with minimal human intervention and at a faster rate.

Trend #4: financial services, the leader in support

The failure of the 40-year-old Silicon Valley Bank on March 10, became the largest bank crash since the 2008 financial crisis and put about $175 billion in customer deposits under regulators’ control. The bank’s customers wanted to get their money out ASAP and on the backend, IT was likely in crisis mode seeking immediate support.

In today’s economic downturn, financial hardship can strike a business at any time. 

A robust IT Service Management solution will ensure a softer landing during times of crisis. Despite the headwinds that the industry faces, technology plays a huge role in anchoring the organization and keeping people happy. In fact, financial service companies are able to keep almost all (98.4%) of their end-users happy.

First, responses play a crucial role in determining the levels of customer satisfaction. They assure end-users that the IT organization is on top of the problem. Among industries, financial services are the fastest to provide a first response—their first response time is 9.45 hours.  

The usage of automation and bots also play a role in minimizing friction while providing solutions—financial services companies can resolve three-quarters of the issues raised in the very first interaction. This translates to huge time and effort savings for customers since they don’t have to go back and forth with an agent to resolve simple issues.

Trend #5: state of play across the globe

Businesses expanding to new markets face a tough challenge with regard to IT Service Management—the expectations and performance of some countries and regions are almost like polar opposites. 

The report shows that in the US, it takes 28 hours to resolve a ticket. Customer satisfaction scores are the highest despite the long wait to get a ticket resolved. 

In India, on the other hand, the resolution times are blazing fast—the lowest in the world (17 hours). However, customer satisfaction scores are the lowest globally, at 89%. 

Fast IT help doesn’t always equal higher satisfaction—showcasing the positive impact personalization has on customer satisfaction in some parts of the world, according to Freshworks’ Senior Director of Customer Engagement Colin Crowley.

Each country had its own strengths and weaknesses when it came to IT service management. By understanding these differences, organizations can tailor their ITSM strategies to meet the unique needs of their customers and stakeholders.

To read the full report, click here: Freshworks’ Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report 2023 

Methodology: Freshworks collected and analyzed anonymized customer data from 118 million unique tickets from 14 industries. The 7,436 organizations of all sizes were from 106 countries. These tickets were all collected across the calendar year (January-December 2022). The dataset contained adequate representation across industries, regions, and organization sizes.

“The State of IT Service Management in 2023” blog contains data from Freshworks’ Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report