Before diving into the differences between different internal support services across the enterprise, let's look at the definition of ESM from ITSM tools.
Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the application of IT service management (ITSM) principles and capabilities to non-IT business areas, with the goal of enhancing their operational performance, services, experiences, and outcomes.
Even in 2025, traditional ticket-based IT support is the most visible and emotionally charged part of enterprise IT.
Among all measurement areas, IT Support triggers the highest volume of both positive and negative feedback.
This validates the long-held assumption that the human interactions tied to resolving tickets shape overall sentiment toward IT more than any other touchpoint.
The way IT communicates with end-users has a disproportionate effect on user sentiment.
Communication that is timely, transparent, and empathetic can significantly boost happiness, even if the issue takes time to resolve.
Poor or absent communication is a top driver of negative feedback, especially during ticket escalations or delays.
Communication is a low-cost, high-impact area to target for quick wins!
Laptops, mobile devices, and business-critical applications are, we could say, pretty important.
People may not complain loudly, but technical friction has a big impact on experience.
In particular:
Laptops and computers show high levels of dissatisfaction tied to time lost.
Enterprise applications also appear frequently in negative experience reports, often related to usability and workflow friction.
These areas perform unevenly. Many users rate usability and discoverability poorly, particularly with enterprise apps and self-service portals.
High neutrality scores in this area suggest apathy or frustration, a sign that systems may be technically functional but not optimized for a better experience.
These two areas are often lumped together, as they represent how well IT understands its users and how it equips them to use technology.
In the 2025 data, low happiness in these areas is closely linked with higher time loss, especially for “Trier” or “Supported” personas (more on them in Chapter 4) who lack confidence or independence in IT.
Investing in better onboarding, contextual help, and just-in-time training can help.
IT has improved hybrid and remote work enablement significantly since the early years of the pandemic.
Happiness is high, and time lost is comparatively low, suggesting that:
VPNs, cloud services, collaboration tools, and remote desktop access have matured
Support for remote users is now better
Still, maintaining this requires continued investment, especially as remote setups become more complex and security expectations grow.
While not a top driver of feedback, the office environment still influences IT sentiment.
Significant issues highlighted in the data are things like poor connectivity, AV setup problems, or shared equipment failures.
Naturally, a not-so-enjoyable work environment will negatively affect workflows and add to frustration.
The foundation of enterprise IT support is still built around ticket-based incidents and requests. Despite advances in automation and AI, human touchpoints continue to have the greatest influence on end-user happiness.
The results presented in the benchmark report reflect the average scores and lost time values of all our customers across numerous industries in over 130 countries.
80% of lost time comes from 13% of tickets
A tiny number of tickets is responsible for a gigantic amount of productivity loss.
This really shows the importance of identifying and addressing high-impact tickets instead of spreading efforts evenly across all cases.
Ticket reassignments are kind of a big deal
Reassigning tickets has a huge impact on both happiness and productivity. As reassignments increase, happiness scores drop (from +85 to +52.)
Time lost also rises from 2 h 0 min to a whopping 9 h 28 min.
Any IT incident = lost productivity
Each IT incident costs an average of €160 in lost productivity, based on 3 h 12 min of average time lost and a €50/hour employee cost.
Finance and Insurance is once again the happiest industry in our benchmark, and they also perceive losing the least time per incident.
The least happy industry is retail, in which front-line worker experience with IT can be challenging due to the nature of the work they are involved with on a day-to-day basis.
To see all industry differences, download the full report.
The regions with the highest scores in 2024 were South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The lowest scores were given in Western Europe. Cultural voting patterns have an impact on how experience data should be interpreted.
Having up-to-date benchmark data about global differences helps understand how to best allocate resources in a way that would achieve comparable experience parity across global locations.
Interestingly, company size has far less impact on employee experience than you might expect.
Happiness scores across organizations of all sizes are quite consistent, ranging between +79 and +82. The largest organizations (over 50,000 employees) report both the highest happiness (+82) and the lowest average productivity loss (2 h 19 min) per incident.
Smaller companies (especially those with 1,000–5,000 employees) tend to lose more time (3 h 20 min). This suggests that while service quality feels good across the board, operational efficiency regarding incidents is an area of potential improvement for mid-sized organizations.
In other words, it’s not about how big your company is, it’s about how well your IT team delivers.
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Understanding IT support profiles helps explain why different users perceive IT services so differently.
We believe that understanding these support profiles is essential for delivering better IT services.
The largest group, Doers (52%), consists of users who are confident with, and willing to solve IT issues themselves.
Prioritizers (24%) are technically skilled but prefer IT to solve problems for them.
Triers (8%) lack technical skills but still attempt to resolve issues before reaching out.
Supported (16%) are technically unskilled and want IT to help them handle issues.
Understanding these differences helps choose more tailored approaches to meet users the way they want to be met.
We're currently loving this quote:
“The number one driver of survey fatigue was the perception that the organization wouldn’t act on the results.”
Close the feedback loop! Gather more data and use it wisely to improve the employee IT experience at your organization. 💡
A few ticket reassignments here, an app with bad UX there, and boom! Productivity drops, trust wavers, and happiness is nowhere to be found. 💔
This has been true for a few years and still is true today: 13% of tickets cause 80% of lost time!
It's like Pareto's law on steroids!
In the end, it's simple. Teams that treat IT as a human-first, feedback-powered function are seeing real results.
From outputs to outcomes, to infinity and beyond.
So whether you’re running a global service desk or rethinking your self-service strategy, one thing is clear: when you put people at the heart of IT, everyone wins.
For full figures and more detailed data, you can download the full 2025 report from the form below.
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