A global survey of 1,000 digital workers and 500 senior IT decision-makers published this week confirms what many managed service providers (MSPs) already know all too well. End users are often their own worst enemies.
Conducted by Nexthink, a provider of a digital employee experience management platform, the Digital Sabotage & The Great Resignation report finds 82 percent of the senior IT managers surveyed said they believe that employees at their organization don’t realize they are often the source of their own digital frustrations.
Balancing the ability to track IT issues with digital experience
More than half of the employees surveyed, meanwhile, said they either try rebooting their machines or ask colleagues if they are also having issues. Only 15 percent report contacting the IT help desk for help.
The survey finds that more than two-thirds of IT leaders (68 percent) are dealing with at least one IT issue a week. However, it’s apparent that many issues involving IT are never brought to anyone’s attention. The primary reason for this is the process by which employees are expected to ask for help is often overly complex. Instead of being issued a job ticket that serves as a record of a request for assistance, most employees just want to be able to send an email or a message via Slack or Microsoft Teams to the IT department that will, hopefully, respond immediately with some helpful tip.
Unfortunately, because of a zeal to track and measure every single interaction between end-users and the IT department, the reason for having an IT service desk in the first place gets lost in what has become an overly bureaucratic process. Regardless of who is at fault, if end users don’t want to take advantage of a service that is there to supposedly help them, something is clearly amiss!
Quality of IT and digital experience under increased scrutiny
MSPs, of course, are just as likely to be guilty of creating an overly complex support process as an internal IT department. The trouble is now that more employees are working from home on a regular basis, the quality of the IT experience is coming under greater scrutiny.
Organizations of all sizes are scrambling to hire and retain talent during a period of high turnover that has become known as the Great Resignation. A big part of any organization’s ability to attract talent, however, now revolves around the quality of the IT experience being provided. In fact, 42 percent of employees surveyed said that the quality of the digital workplace influences their willingness to recommend their organization to job seekers. A full 82 percent of IT decision-makers agreed with that assessment, with 64 percent owning up to the fact that they are responsible for creating that experience.
The challenge… and the opportunity
MSPs that provide a superior end-user experience, are going to be better positioned to both convince a potential customer to outsource IT support to them, while at the same time fending off rivals. One of the reasons there are so many internal IT teams is the leaders of many organizations are convinced an internal IT team will provide a better personal experience to employees. The Nexthink survey makes it clear that perception and the IT reality being experienced by employees could not be much farther apart. The challenge and the opportunity now is to re-engineer an IT support process that as far as most consumers of that service are concerned is clearly broken.
