A VPN drops right before a client call, or a laptop freezes mid-presentation. The instinct these days is not to contact the help desk, but to fix the problem independently. According to Ivanti's 2025 Digital Employee Experience Report, nearly half of office workers (49 percent) say they would rather resolve an IT issue themselves than contact the help desk, and that figure is up four percentage points in just one year. Yet only 13 percent find it easy to do so. For everyone else, the service desk remains the lifeline when work grinds to a halt.
A service desk is the first point of contact between an organization’s IT function and the people who depend on it: resetting a password, restoring access after an outage, resolving a hardware fault or dealing with any other issue that disrupts work.
As enterprise technology stacks grow larger and more complex, so does the volume of support requests. Service desks are expected to manage more incidents across more applications, devices and cloud environments than ever before. The result is longer response times, growing backlogs and mounting pressure on support teams. Ivanti's research identifies repetitive, time-consuming tasks and long resolution times as the two biggest strains on today's IT support teams, each cited by 34 percent of the respondents. Limited resources followed close behind at 31 percent. As teams struggle to absorb rising ticket volumes, service quality inevitably suffers. A service desk built on manual processes and siloed teams can no longer deliver the speed and experience that today's end users expect.
Seven practices for a service desk that users trust
- Map services to business needs. Most internally run service desks lack a clear picture of their own ticket volumes, staffing needs and hours of coverage. Mappingservice desk support to actual business requirements helps size staffing and coverage hours to match demand instead of guesswork. This reduces wasted capacity and closes gaps during genuine peak periods.
- Design for flexible staffing. Support demand is not constant. A service desk built for everyday demand can quickly become overwhelmed during a system rollout or seasonal surge. Scaling support as demand changes helps maintain service levels without overstaffing. Tracking cost per ticket or cost per user makes that scaling easy to justify.
- Choose process over people. When one skilled agent goes on leave, a people-dependent service desk stalls. Building repeatable processes that any trained agent can follow protects service quality against the high attrition that help desks face and shortens the ramp-up time needed to bring new agents to full productivity.
- Build a searchable knowledge base. Every avoidable ticket carries a hidden cost: It pulls agents away from complex, higher-value work and leaves end users waiting, who grow increasingly frustrated with each passing hour. A knowledge base solves this from both directions—letting end users resolve common issues without raising a ticket at all, and giving agents consistent, accurate answers on demand instead of reinventing the same fix repeatedly. It also doubles as training material for new hires and chatbots alike.
- Expand self-service. Employee appetite for self-service is already there. Ivanti's 2025 research found that 36 percent of employees would now choose a chatbot over a human agent to solve a routine IT problem, provided that option is well built and genuinely easy to use.
- Automate core workflows. Automating ticket routing, categorization and escalation takes the repetitive, manual load off agents, freeing them for complex, judgement-heavy issues and cutting the errors that come with repetitive manual handling. The impact is also reflected in resolution times: Fixify's 2026 IT Help Desk Benchmark Report found that fully automated tickets are resolved in an average of 2.4 to 6.3 hours, compared to 49 to 102 hours for partially automated tickets. Over time,service desk automation turns these incremental improvements into a sustained operational advantage.
- Track the metrics that matter. Continuous tracking of abandonment rates, response times and satisfaction scores does more than report performance. It identifies the small set of issues responsible for the greatest impact. According to HappySignals' 2025 Global IT Experience Benchmark Report, just 13 percent of tickets account for 80 percent of all lost employee productivity, making targeted redemption far more effective than blanket measures.
Collectively, these seven practices shift a service desk away from reactive firefighting toward a model end users can rely on.
Trust, not tickets, is the real metric
A service desk succeeds or fails because of perception, not just performance data. Even a technically fast service desk loses credibility if end users feel unheard, or if the same problem keeps recurring. Organizations moving from service level agreements (SLAs) toward experience-level agreements (XLAs) recognize this shift, measuring success by what matters most to the person on the other end of the ticket, not just how quickly it was closed. Aservice desk built around the end-user experience earns something ticket-closure numbers alone cannot: quiet, ongoing trust.
How Infosys BPM can help
Infosys BPM's Service Desk Services helps organizations move away from break-fix support and toward a proactive, metrics-driven service desk. Our service combines cognitive automation, a unified agent desktop and self-help options to keep resolution consistent regardless of who picks up the ticket. Flexible, globally delivered staffing absorbs volume spikes without straining service levels. The result is a service desk built around what earns trust: fewer repeat problems, faster answers and support that holds steady when it matters most.
