IT issues resolved 23% faster by companies in 2021

Freshworks Inc., a software company that empowers the people who power businesses, has released the results of its second annual Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report, which measured key performance indicators (KPIs) for the IT industry across 62 million tickets in 2021.

According to the report, global IT teams adapted to remote work in 2021, resolving employee tickets 23% faster than the previous year, while overall resolution time for IT tickets decreased by seven hours.

In a world where employees increasingly rely on technology to get their work done at home, at the office, and everywhere in between, the Freshworks report confirmed that new technologies that enable chatbots and virtual agents are helping employees and companies become more productive — and even delighting them along the way.

“Making sure IT works flawlessly is essential for modern businesses to succeed,” said Prasad Ramakrishnan, CIO of Freshworks. “Analysing data from around the world, we found that IT teams mastered the challenges of remote work last year in large part by employing powerful yet easy-to-use technologies that help them do more, faster. Importantly, these technologies are also engaging employees at work, which is critical to help companies retain talent and grow.”

The report examined anonymous, aggregated data from 86 countries, over 4,200 organizations, and over 62 million individual employee support tickets. New technology features such as AI-powered responses aided in the speeding up of resolutions, as bots deflected nearly 60% of tickets.

Companies that used automations had resolution times that were 22% faster than those that did not, and companies that offered a catalog of IT services through their ITSM software had resolution times that were 17% faster than those that did not. Companies are paying attention and rapidly implementing more advanced technologies. Bots and workflow applications were used in nearly 25% of integrations, a 40% increase from 2020.

While chat accounted for less than 1% of IT interactions, it provided significant benefits: employees who chatted with virtual agents achieved 100% customer satisfaction in some cases, while delivering 48 percent faster responses (5.21 hours) and 62% faster resolution times (8.74 hours) than those who did not use virtual agents.

Freshworks analysed KPIs across 14 industries to understand how industries compare to each other:

• Happy hoteliers: Companies in hotels, tourism, and leisure achieved the highest employee satisfaction rating (98.01%).
• Real estate resolutions: Property development and building infrastructure companies have the lowest average resolution time at 18.49 hours, while leisure and hospitality has the highest (27.32).
• Consumer products and services finish first in first response: Their average first response arrived in 8.23 hours, nearly 50% faster than the industry with the slowest first response time (healthcare).
• Retail and e-commerce IT departments fix it fast: They achieved the highest first contact resolution rate at 73%.

The report also examined regional differences. Notably, the report discovered that North American IT departments received the highest customer satisfaction rating of 97.92%. However, resolving employee queries requires multiple interactions, resulting in the world’s longest average resolution time of 24.27 hours. Companies in Latin America, on the other hand, are the quickest to assign tickets and respond to customer issues, with times of 8.24 hours and 7.60 hours, respectively.