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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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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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