The traditional service desk is racing towards obsolescence – and IT professionals know it. In fact, 72% of IT pros surveyed believe the “reactive” service desk, as we know it today, will cease to exist in the next 3 years.
A clear majority of those same IT professionals believe that the service desk of the future will proactively manage the user experience, using AI and automated tools to do so, rather than responding to tickets and outages (the traditional, reactive approach).
Nexthink surveyed (access the full report) 1,000 global IT professionals from organizations of all sizes, 72% of them IT managers and 28% of them frontline/service desk employees, regarding how they see the future of the service desk.
While there is great optimism for a more productive and proactive service desk of the future, survey respondents also see big obstacles potentially blocking the path from here (reactive) to there (proactive).
Today’s Service Desk: Going the Way of the Dinosaur
Technological change is a big driver of change: recent breakthroughs in Generative AI and Large Language Models have made a proactive approach to IT support more feasible, while the thought of a user submitting a ticket to their help desk is beginning to feel like calling someone on a telephone landline of the 1990s (it’ll be possible, but infrequent).
We’re already seeing clear evidence that IT departments can drive significant productivity gains by deploying proactive support tools like chatbots and other forms of AI-fueled automation.
The Future: Digital Employee Experience
That leaves us with a huge question. If today’s service desk is speeding towards obsolescence, what’s going to replace it?
Three words: Digital Employee Experience. A stunning 96% of survey respondents think that most organizations will have a team dedicated to user/digital employee experience within the next 3 years. Digital employee experience, or DEX, can be defined as “an employee’s holistic experience with the digital workplace provided by IT. It is based on the performance of one’s device(s), applications, networks, and end-user sentiment.”
Your DEX matters, today and tomorrow, because enabling your people to do their best work matters.
Evolving Tools and Technologies for DEX
Every IT department around the world shares a desire for enhancing the productivity and experience of users. In order to drive those productivity and DEX gains, a majority of surveyed IT professionals believe that there are distinct operational tactics and technologies that should be deployed.
For example, proactive IT management: 87% of respondents agree that without it, the future of incident response will be economically unsustainable.
1. Proactive IT Management is a strategy that leverages early warning system detection, full visibility, machine-learning pattern spotting, and smart, scalable automated remediations. It’s a proactive approach to supporting productivity and DEX, rather than a reactive one.
But when it comes to implementing proactive IT management solutions, survey respondents cited a number of obstacles standing in the way, including:
- Employee resistance to change (cited by 40% of respondents);
- IT feeling stuck with time-consuming reactive issues (38%); and
- Lack of visibility/automation within legacy infrastructure (37%).
2. Self-Service IT is another key component of any future IT support approach. It’s a strategy that gives employees the means to resolve IT issues themselves, so they don’t need to reach out to the service desk.
Boosted by AI technologies, self-service IT solutions are growing in both presence and capability within the largest organizations around the globe. Giving employees the tools to solve their own technology issues can reduce overall workplace frustration, cut downtime, and improve productivity (and DEX).
One caveat here: businesses should obviously prioritize digital employee experience over reduction of operational costs. A frustrating self-service chatbot or automated tool that doesn’t function, for example, can create more disruption and employee disengagement than a slow service desk.
While self-service tools like chatbots and digital knowledge bases have improved in quality and scalability in recent years, and while IT professionals recognize self-service as an important component of future IT support, many survey respondents still have concerns – 76% of them report that employees are resistant to deploying their own fixes.
3. AI-fueled automation will clearly be part of any future of IT support. The dominant media narrative about IT workers feeling anxious and stressed out about being replaced by AI doesn’t tell the entire story. The truth is far more complex. Survey respondents overwhelmingly reported feeling optimistic about new AI automation technologies, both for their organizations and for their personal careers.
In fact, 96% of respondents agree that it’s essential that they learn how to effectively deploy AI technologies to ensure future job security.
Digital Adoption as a Focus of DEX
The future “digital experience” desk will not only be proactive, but will also concentrate on digital adoption. The IT professionals surveyed see themselves and their function evolving from “putting out fires” to “functioning as work app teachers/consultants” as well as helping new employees with onboarding.
But when it comes to digital adoption and its role in creating improved digital employee experiences, a majority of surveyed IT professionals believe the biggest obstacles to change involve:
- complex/un-intuitive software (cited by 75% of respondents),
- insufficient employee training (75%),
- employee resistance (74%), and
- an inability to measure and monitor tool adoption (70%).
From Reactive IT to the Proactive Future
Gaining necessary buy-in for change, both from the IT/service desk team and from users themselves, is often the hardest step of any IT transformation. We clearly have the technology tools we need to make the change succeed, but a proactive approach to the service desk will require people to adopt new ways of working.
What’s the top reason that change initiatives fail? People resist and fail to adopt the intended change.
But there are effective ways to drive adoption. For example, the IT team at a large global consulting organization turned to a single DEX platform to help improve the adoption of its self-help application for 15,000 employees. For months prior, employee adoption of the self-help app remained stagnant, but after just a month of using the platform’s self-service technology, the team’s self-service portal received over 10,000 visitors—a 400% increase compared to the previous month. In addition, IT ticket counts dropped by 23%.
What’s needed to ensure the proactive future of the service desk is a digital platform that:
- provides IT with full visibility into user adoption,
- supports remote, one-click automations, accelerated issue diagnostics and remediation, and end-to-end visibility across the digital workplace,
- enables two-way communication, and
- can be utilized for a variety of use cases like: self-help, survey collection, and IT communications.
IT professionals know the future of IT support is proactive, but getting your people to adopt new ways of working may be the biggest challenge you face.