The Global IT Experience Benchmark Report Highlights Key IT Issues

Helsinki April 16, 2024 – HappySignals, the creator of the IT Experience Management (ITXM™) Framework and leader in human-centric experience management for IT, today released the full 2023 version of its The Global IT Experience Benchmark Report. This biannual experience benchmark report shares aggregated corporate IT performance insights – for in-house and outsourced IT service providers – to inspire IT organizations to target continual improvement activities on “what matters most.”

Whether you’re a CIO, IT leader, or IT service owner who must deliver great IT experiences to end-users in 2024, your IT organization needs to start making informed improvement decisions based on experience data. The superior experiences that result will drive better business operations and outcomes and ultimately improve the corporate bottom line.

The Global IT Experience Benchmark Highlights

In the latest Global IT Experience Benchmark Report, some of the key experience insights include that:

• IT support services have the most significant positive impact on the Overall IT Experience
• The average Happiness with incident handling is +79 with 3h 12min lost time per ticket
• Each time a ticket is reassigned, end-user happiness decreases by more than seven points, and users lose an average of 1 hour and 46 minutes of work time, ranging from 0 to 4 reassignments. When a ticket is reassigned four times, it can result in a total loss of 9 hours and 8 minutes.
• The attitude of IT personnel is a strong factor in how end-users perceive IT, with a majority indicating it as a reason for positive experiences
• 80% of the lost time with IT incidents still comes from only 13% of tickets
• When end-users provide a bad score, 51% say it’s because “My ticket was not solved,” but this issue is mentioned in just 3.6% of incident handling feedback
• The average Happiness with service request handling is +84 with 3h 16min lost time
• Enterprise Applications, Mobile Devices, and Laptops and Computers are still the lowest-scoring IT areas in the Overall IT Experience, and Service Portal Experience has dropped from +32 to +27
• While end-users feel they lose more time with Remote-Work-related issues, they still rate Remote Work +42 points higher than the Office Environment
• Outsourced service desks have happier end-users than internal ones – +80 versus +79 – despite end-users losing less time with internal service desks
• The number of employees in an organization has little impact on Happiness scores, but the perception of lost time with each incident does – the larger the company, the more time end-users perceive losing with each incident
• Western European end-users are still the most critical of their IT support despite losing less time with incidents (2h 38min) than the other regions – for example, North American end-users score incident resolutions 6 points higher (+81) than Western Europe (+75) despite losing almost 1 hour more work time per incident
• North American end-users, on the other hand, score service requests 4 points lower (+80) than Western Europeans (+84) and perceive losing 3.5 hours more per request than Western Europeans
• Western Europe remains an anomaly, with just 1h 46min on average in perceived work time lost per request – this is more than 2 hours less than the second lowest lost time average
• The IT support profile mix differs by region, as shown in the table below (green is the high score, and red is the low score) – this not only reflects culture, as the kind of work being done in different regions also plays a role
• Self-service portals are the preferred channel for Doers, who enjoy solving issues themselves; Prioritizers, who prefer minimal participation, use the Phone more than other support profiles; and Supported and Triers use Walk-in IT support 30-35% more than Doers and Prioritizers
• There’s a wide range of industry-based differences in Happiness scores – where end-users in the financial and insurance sectors report high satisfaction and minimal disruption through to the technology industry where end-users report the lowest levels of Happiness and the longest wait times.

These insights are based on 1.86 million pieces of end-user feedback across 130 countries collected between January-December 2023 by customers that use the HappySignals IT Experience Management Platform. These customers include large enterprises, public sector organizations, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who use the HappySignals Platform with their customers. About 60% of HappySignals customers are using outsourced service desk providers.

It’s important to appreciate that these insights relate to organizations already investing in improvements to address end-user experience issues rather than reflecting “average” IT organizations still reliant on traditional IT metrics.

 “Experience data and insights are now vital to the IT leadership management tool kit. Leaders have moved beyond using experience data to simply increase IT service desk performance to leverage the insights to improve strategic decision-making and evolve the corporate IT service provider to better meet business and employee IT enablement needs,” said Sami Kallio, CEO of HappySignals.

How the Experience Data is Gathered

HappySignals IT Experience Management Platform connects with operational data from customers’ IT service management (ITSM) platforms. HappySignals surveys ask questions related to: 
• Happiness
  – where end-users rate how happy they are with the measured IT area (e.g. recent ticket-based service experience, enterprise applications, or mobile devices) on a scale from 0-10. The NPS model is then used to derive the Happiness rating.
• Productivity
  – where end-users estimate how much work time they lost, i.e. productivity, due to the measured IT area.

End-users can also select the factors that influenced their Happiness rating from a list of suggested reasons. 

About HappySignals

HappySignals is the leading SaaS company for IT Experience Management, empowering enterprises to improve employee experiences. HappySignals enables IT leaders to get real-time understanding of the experiences they deliver to end-users across all IT services. IT leaders use experience data to make informed decisions to improve employee happiness and productivity.

Established in 2014 and based in Helsinki, Finland, HappySignals discovers the experiences of millions of employees in 130 countries. Customers have been able to make employees happier and increase productivity by 26%. For more information, visit www.happysignals.com.

Media Contact

Eva Taskinen
eva.taskinen@happysignals.com