ControlUp released findings from an analysis of more than one million real-world IT help desk tickets, revealing that employee sign-in issues represent a significant portion of IT support requests. At some enterprises included in the analysis, authentication-related problems accounted for as much as 53% of help desk tickets. The most common issues included password resets, account lockouts, disabled accounts, and multifactor authentication (MFA) challenges.
MFA enrollment and re-enrollment issues also continue to generate support demand, particularly when employees replace or upgrade their phones.
Beyond authentication, the findings show a broader challenge for IT organizations: the issues generating the most tickets are not necessarily those causing the greatest disruption. Routine account and password issues were often resolved in minutes, while network, printer, and other infrastructure problems could take days. At one retailer, tickets for whole-site network outages took a median of almost a week to close.
What the Ticket Data Reveals
The analysis identified several patterns that illustrate where IT support resources are consumed and which issues create the greatest disruption.
- Resolution time: At one large enterprise, account tickets had a median resolution time of 11 minutes, compared with 50 hours for network problems, and 87% of network and phone tickets were reassigned between teams, compared with 20% of account tickets.
- Virtual desktops: Virtual desktop access and performance problems appeared in 55% of analyzed organizations. At one bank, about half of all virtual desktop incidents (51%) were employees who could not get a working desktop at all. Those incidents took a median of about one day to resolve, and about half were passed between teams.
- MFA: MFA enrollment problems showed up as a named ticket driver in 40% of the organizations analyzed, and one in five organizations tied the volume directly to employees getting a new phone. At one construction firm, MFA resets and re-enrollments, most often after an employee got a new phone, were the single largest ticket type at 7.5% of all tickets.
- Machine-generated tickets: Machine-generated tickets from monitoring, security, backup, patching and other systems appeared in half of the organizations studied. In 15% of organizations, they made up between a quarter and a half of all tickets.
- Phone support: In the 35% of organizations whose ticket data recorded how requests came in, 57% showed the phone carried about two-thirds or more of all contacts. At one organization, it accounted for as much as 99% of recorded contacts.
Taken together, the findings suggest that the greatest opportunities to improve IT support may come from reducing recurring incidents and prioritizing issues that have a larger impact on employees and business operations, rather than focusing exclusively on ticket volume or resolution speed.
“IT organizations have traditionally measured support performance by how quickly they close tickets, but that doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Simon Townsend, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Office of the CTO at ControlUp. “A password reset that takes a few minutes and an infrastructure failure that disrupts an entire location shouldn’t carry the same operational weight. IT leaders need to understand which problems are recurring, which are preventable and which have the greatest impact on productivity. That means moving beyond ticket management to addressing the conditions that create support demand in the first place.”
Turning support insights into preventive action
The research underscores the opportunity to move IT support from reactive troubleshooting toward preventing recurring problems. Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) builds on Digital Employee Experience (DEX) capabilities by combining real-time endpoint telemetry, AI and automation to identify and remediate technology issues.
For example, recurring application crashes or endpoint performance problems can be detected and investigated before employees submit tickets, with approved remediation workflows automating appropriate fixes. This approach can help IT teams reduce repetitive troubleshooting, prioritize issues based on their impact and prevent routine technology problems from disrupting employees.
Find the Patterns in Your Environment, in Seven Days
Organizations can identify similar patterns in their own environments with ControlUp Challenge, a personalized seven-day evaluation of help desk tickets and endpoint data. The assessment surfaces recurring support issues, high-impact problems, and automation opportunities, and delivers a business case based on the organization’s operational data. Example report here.
Participate in the ControlUp Challenge at https://www.controlup.com/take-the-controlup-challenge/.
About the analysis
ControlUp analyzed more than one million (1,069,110) help desk tickets from enterprise organizations across retail, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, construction, energy, and IT services. Because the organizations vary in size by more than a hundredfold, the research reports the range across organizations and the number of organizations where each pattern appeared, rather than an average that the largest organizations would dominate.
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