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Companies Resolved Employee IT Issues Faster in 2021

Global IT teams adapted to remote work in 2021, resolving employee tickets 23% faster than the year before as overall resolution time for IT tickets went down by 7 hours, according to the Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report from Freshworks.

In a world where employees increasingly rely on technology to get their work done at home, in the office, and everywhere in between, the report confirmed that new technologies that enable chatbots and virtual agents are making a substantial impact 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. "Analyzing 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."

New tech features including AI-powered responses played a significant role in speeding up resolutions as bots deflected nearly 60% of tickets. Companies with automations achieved resolution times 22% faster than those who did not, and companies offering a catalog of IT services through their ITSM software reduced resolution times 17% compared to those who did not.

Companies are taking notice and rapidly adopting more advanced technologies. Nearly 25% of integrations included bots and workflow applications — a 40% increase compared to 2020.

While less than one percent of IT interactions were via chat, this channel provided significant benefits: employees who chatted with virtual agents saw customer satisfaction scores hit 100% in some cases, while delivering 48% faster responses (5.21 hours) and 62% faster resolution times (8.74 hours) compared to those who don' t use virtual agents.

Freshworks analyzed 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 analyzed regional differences. Notably, the report found that North American IT departments achieved the highest customer satisfaction rating at 97.92%. However, it takes multiple interactions to resolve employee queries, leading to the longest average resolution time in the world at 24.27 hours. Conversely, companies in Latin America are the quickest to assign tickets and respond to customer issues within 8.24 hours and 7.60 hours, respectively.

Methodology: The report measured key performance indicators (KPIs) for the IT industry from 86 countries, more than 4,200 organizations, and over 62 million unique employee support tickets.

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Companies Resolved Employee IT Issues Faster in 2021

Global IT teams adapted to remote work in 2021, resolving employee tickets 23% faster than the year before as overall resolution time for IT tickets went down by 7 hours, according to the Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report from Freshworks.

In a world where employees increasingly rely on technology to get their work done at home, in the office, and everywhere in between, the report confirmed that new technologies that enable chatbots and virtual agents are making a substantial impact 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. "Analyzing 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."

New tech features including AI-powered responses played a significant role in speeding up resolutions as bots deflected nearly 60% of tickets. Companies with automations achieved resolution times 22% faster than those who did not, and companies offering a catalog of IT services through their ITSM software reduced resolution times 17% compared to those who did not.

Companies are taking notice and rapidly adopting more advanced technologies. Nearly 25% of integrations included bots and workflow applications — a 40% increase compared to 2020.

While less than one percent of IT interactions were via chat, this channel provided significant benefits: employees who chatted with virtual agents saw customer satisfaction scores hit 100% in some cases, while delivering 48% faster responses (5.21 hours) and 62% faster resolution times (8.74 hours) compared to those who don' t use virtual agents.

Freshworks analyzed 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 analyzed regional differences. Notably, the report found that North American IT departments achieved the highest customer satisfaction rating at 97.92%. However, it takes multiple interactions to resolve employee queries, leading to the longest average resolution time in the world at 24.27 hours. Conversely, companies in Latin America are the quickest to assign tickets and respond to customer issues within 8.24 hours and 7.60 hours, respectively.

Methodology: The report measured key performance indicators (KPIs) for the IT industry from 86 countries, more than 4,200 organizations, and over 62 million unique employee support tickets.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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