The HappySignals ITXM & User Group meeting was packed with valuable takeaways for the audience. Here’s the CTMS view.
From real-world use cases to forward-thinking insights, the HappySignals ITXM & User Group meeting was packed with valuable takeaways for the audience. Here’s the CTMS view.
As always, the audience was eagerly looking forward to the release of the 2025 Global IT Experience Benchmark Report. It is a valuable report that continues to set the standard for how organisations understand, measure and act on IT experience data to unlock smarter decisions and real business impact.
Eye-catching highlights from the ITXM benchmark report
Whilst listening to Sakari Kyrö, Product Strategy Lead at HappySignals, present the benchmark report highlights, two stats really stood out.
- 13% of IT tickets account for 80% of all lost productivity
- Every ticket reassignment drops the customer experience score by 8 points and costs two hours of productivity
These numbers should be seen as a call to action for IT leaders to up their game. And they align with what CTMS hears when working with clients to analyse and improve their ITSM processes.
Why these ITXM stats matter for ITSM teams
If you start to break down the figures, it becomes clear that there must be significant issues buried somewhere within an organisation’s service processes.
It’s worth repeating: 13% of IT tickets are behind 80% of all lost productivity. It’s like Pareto’s 80:20 law on steroids!
And the impact of ticket reassignment is staggering. Let’s face it, no-one likes being passed from one team to another. We’ve all experienced the frustration of explaining your situation to one agent or team and then it feels like starting all over again when your case is passed to someone new.
When you consider the scale of the impact on productivity and customer experience scores from every ticket reassignment, you start to see just how costly those hidden inefficiencies can be.
Add them all up and likely to mean an increase in overall user dissatisfaction and reduction in overall organisational performance.
Ticket reassignment: the hidden productivity killer
Negative outcomes are typically driven by:
- Slow resolution times
- Incorrect or premature ticket closures
- Lack of communication between (siloed) IT teams
A common root cause that ties all of these together is ticket reassignment. Reassigning a ticket might seem like a routine step when interacting with the IT support team, and in many cases, it will be the right course of action. So what we are really talking about is incorrect ticket reassignment.
The HappySignals benchmark data shows that each reassignment carries a cost in terms of user satisfaction and lost time and therefore productivity. We frequently see this issue crop up due to mismatched workflows, unclear responsibilities or gaps between the 1st Line Service Desk and specific resolution groups.
It’s fairly common for these different resolution groups to have slightly different ways of working; they could be making different assumptions about ticket ownership and even have differing expectations of what a completed ticket looks like. These all add up to delays, misunderstandings and ultimately a poor experience for the end user.
Bridging the gap between service desk and resolution teams
How do you go about fixing this will vary from situation to situation. One thing is clear, pointing the finger of blame won’t get you anywhere. What you need is clarity. At CTMS, we specialise in reviewing and aligning IT workflows to eliminate ambiguity and improve collaboration.
When we review incident management processes, one of the most common improvements we help clients make is building a single, commonly agreed understanding of the ticket lifecycle and all the stages in-between involving the Service Desk and Resolution teams.
Designing centralised, documented processes and making sure that everyone understands and follows them can reduce ticket reassignment, shorten resolution times, and dramatically improve the service experience.
Happier users = greater productivity
The core message of the HappySignals Benchmark Report is clear: happier users drive better business outcomes. When users feel supported, heard and confident in IT support, they work more efficiently. Users submit fewer tickets, they experience less frustration and they are more likely to embrace new technologies and systems.
End user surveys alone are not the right answer. To effectively act on experience data requires buying into an ITXM platform. But it’s much more than just plumbing HappySignals into your ITSM system and collecting data.
The real challenge comes with acting on the data by interpreting it, and understanding what it is telling you about your IT operations. But that in itself means having the time, experience and internal resource to:
- Analyse trends in the data
- Identify root causes of poor experiences
- Facilitate process changes across departments
- Measure the impact of those changes over time
But how many IT teams have the time and determination to manage all of that on top of BAU activities? Or the expertise required to make the right cultural changes? That’s where working with an experienced partner like CTMS can make all the difference.
How CTMS can help you Align, Transform and Evolve
At CTMS, we don’t just help you understand your experience data, we can help you to act on it. Our approach is focused on achieving better team alignment, transforming processes, improving system interactions and ultimately evolving how you deliver services.
This will typically include bringing Service Desk and Resolution Teams together to create shared goals, clearly defined roles and more consistent workflows. We can help to identify and eliminate process inefficiencies that lead to ticket reassignments and user frustration.
As part of a drive towards continual service improvement, we can help customers use experience data to help you continuously improve, adapt and deliver world-class IT services.
Taking the first step to act on ITXM data
If you want to build a productive and efficient organisation, supported by an agile and effective ITSM platform, take the first step by exploring the full HappySignals 2025 Global IT Experience Benchmark Report here.
But remember, ITXM data will only help to identify what’s wrong, you need to commit to doing something about it.