Breaking the service desk’s reactive loop: DEX for ITSM teams

Ian Aitchison proposes a new way to address common service desk challenges before they impact the customer experience.

Most service desks spend their time responding to incidents. Tickets come in, analysts resolve them, and performance is measured against response and resolution targets. The same issues often return the following month: slow laptops, crashing applications, dropped VPN connections and full disks. The team meets its targets, but the underlying causes remain.

Much of the cost never appears in service desk reports. Employees lose time to issues they never report,  while analysts spend valuable minutes every day – and hours every month dealing with incidents they’ve seen many times before. The usual performance measures rarely show how much time the business loses.

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) gives IT a way to identify these issues and address them before they generate another ticket. Drawing on work with organisations over recent years, this article looks at how DEX can change the way service desk and ITSM teams operate.

Defining DEX

DEX can be defined as understanding and improving the effectiveness of technology enabling people to be successful in work. To put it another way – finding and removing digital friction wherever it occurs.

This covers devices, applications, networks, collaboration tools and the support around them, viewed from the employee’s perspective.

Some activities labelled as DEX focus mainly on satisfaction measurement. That might be a survey after a ticket is closed, an XLA that adds sentiment to an SLA, or an annual survey where most respondents say IT is doing a good job. These measures have their uses, but in a DEX world they don’t show the full picture. They tell you about the people who contacted IT or who chose to respond, not about the employee who loses twenty minutes every morning waiting for a laptop to start and never contacts IT.

DEX platforms collect data from devices and applications, including boot times, crashes, CPU and memory pressure, network performance and application response times. Combined with employee feedback, this helps IT identify real issues that reactive ticket data alone will miss.

Having the data is a start, but that doesn’t improve anyone’s experience on its own. The real change comes from what the DEX team and service desk does with it.

Five principles

The approach rests on five principles. Each boldly challenges a familiar habit in service management.

1. People shouldn’t be sensors. Employees shouldn’t have to spot an issue and report it before IT takes action. By then, they’ve already lost time. IT should be able to identify issues from the data and, where possible, fix them before employees notice, and ideally stop them happening in the future
2. People don’t want to contact IT. Many employees work around issues instead of reporting them. They restart a laptop, find another way to complete a task or ask a colleague for help. Anything that expects an employee to stop working and contact IT is introducing – not removing – friction.
3. We don’t need another hero. Service desks and IT have long valued people who can react to resolve difficult incidents quickly under pressure. That skill matters, but a DEX culture should value and always reward incident prevention above crisis escalation. If it happens at all we have failed.
4. We don’t exist to “make our users happy”. Sentiment and satisfaction help show where improvements are needed and whether they’re working. But it only measures how people feel, not the end goal. The focus should be on removing what makes it harder for people to work, and their sentiment is a by-product, which is evidence DEX is successful
5. Time is the currency of DEX. A slow log-in or a crashing application costs someone time. Scaling mere minutes of impact across 1000s of employees and minutes or hours of remediation work for IT adds up to huge numbers across a month and a year. Fixing the cause gives that time back to employees and means IT spends less time dealing with the same incident again. Save just a minute a day for 1000 people every day and you’ve given 760 8-hour-days of productivity back to the business.

Taken together, these principles change the emphasis from reactively responding to reported incidents to proactively hunting and eliminating the causes of wasted time. DEX technology helps make that possible, but the service desk needs to change how it works too.

What a DEX platform does

DEX tools collect data, detect issues, automate remediation, communicate with employees, and connect with ITSM and other systems. They can also help IT make better decisions about investment and change.

Installing a platform and building dashboards won’t reduce incidents by itself. Teams need to use the data to decide what to address, take action and check whether the changes have worked.

That requires changes to the way people work, the processes they follow and the way they communicate. Three areas are particularly important.

Culture and people

For the service desk, DEX brings four shifts in role and mindset.

• From reactive to proactive. Analysts still deal with the current queue, but they also look at data to identify trends and prevent future incidents.
• From fielder to hunter. Rather than waiting for tickets to arrive, the team searches its data for issues and investigates what’s causing them.
• From fixer to creator. If an analyst has resolved the same issue fifty times, they can use that experience to build an automated fix and move on to the next recurring issue.
• From fast food server to gourmet chef. The work shifts away from handling high volumes of routine transactions towards more skilled analysis and improvement.

These changes give service desk staff more scope to use their technical and analytical skills. They can spend less time repeating the same fixes and more time finding better ways to support the organisation.

Operational practices

The team also needs clear ownership and a way of working. Organisations can start with a small cross-functional group drawn from IT management, first-line and second-line support, and specialist desktop, application, network and data teams. Much of the necessary expertise is already available, so a major reorganisation isn’t required.

The group needs a repeatable lifecycle-based process for taking a DEX opportunity from hypothesis and discovery through creation to publication and eventually retirement. A continual time-based DEX roadmap, supporting all lifecycle stages keep DEX moving, drives communication and proves value.

Communication and value

Communication needs to run alongside that work. DEX gives IT the ability to tell employees about an issue before they notice it, confirm when it has been fixed or ask for feedback when something goes wrong.

The same applies within IT and to the wider business. Many improvements go unseen because the employee never experiences the issue in the first place. Reporting on time saved and incidents avoided helps leaders understand what the work has delivered and supports decisions about further investment.

Where ITSM fits

DEX supports several ITSM practices, giving teams more information to work with and more opportunities to act before employees are affected.

• In self-service, DEX can identify a device issue and run a fix automatically. A portal can also show employees known issues affecting them and provide a way to resolve issues such as a slow machine. DEX-powered chatbots can find issues, create tickets, remediate the issue and resolve the ticket, all in conversation with an employee.
• In incident management, DEX can trigger remediation when a ticket is raised. It can also create and resolve tickets for issues it detects and fixes automatically, while giving analysts relevant context and recommended actions.
• In problem management, data across devices and applications can reveal patterns that are difficult to spot from individual tickets. For example, it may show that a particular driver version is causing crashes across a laptop model.
• In change enablement, DEX data can help IT assess whether a release has improved the employee experience or made it worse.

What “zero tickets” means

“Zero tickets” is a phrase often used around DEX. It can be misunderstood. In the BRC Associates approach, it means a future vision where employees need to raise no new incidents. The service desk must remain the system of record, and tickets raised by technology can increase as more issues are detected and fixed automatically.

The aim is to reduce the friction that employees experience and the time they spend waiting for help. No requirement for them to contact IT to report a fault. Analysts get more context and spend less time talking people through routine fixes. This can also improve mean time to resolution (MTTR) and performance against SLAs and XLAs.

Common pitfalls

One common mistake is treating DEX as a tool deployment. The platform is installed, and data starts coming through, but nobody owns the work of acting on it. Without changes to how the team operates, little improves.

Another is relying on sentiment alone. A better satisfaction score doesn’t necessarily explain what has changed. Time saved and incidents avoided help show what the work has achieved.

Teams can also try to tackle too much at once. DEX data can uncover a long list of issues, but it’s better to start with a few that affect people regularly, fix them properly and build from there.

Finally, the work needs to be communicated. Employees should know when IT has fixed something that affected them, and leaders need to see the results. Otherwise, the value of the work can go unnoticed.

Getting started

Start with the data you already have. Review recent tickets and identify incidents IT might have been able to detect before an employee reported them.

Choose one recurring issue that costs people time. Measure how often it happens, fix the cause and report the difference in time saved and incidents avoided. That gives the business a concrete result and a basis for deciding what to tackle next.

The aim isn’t to introduce another tool and leave the service desk working as before. It’s to use what the technology reveals to change how the team spends its time.

The BRC Associates team will be exhibiting at ITSM26 on 9th-10th November. Come and speak to us about how DEX could help your service desk move beyond reactive support and start preventing the issues that cost your people time.