Digital employee experience, or the quality of employee interactions with digital tools, is important in the workplace—and employers are failing the test, new research from Ivanti shows.
Ivanti’s report found that digital employee experience (also known as DEX) often falls short exactly where most employees need it most: the help desk. Over half (52%) of employees surveyed feel that improving the help desk is a priority—the highest single improvement noted in the polling, even ahead of AI adoption and cybersecurity.
Easy B. Overall, employees graded their help desks a “B.” That could hint at bigger problems for how IT manages tech assistance for employees; it could also reflect the reality that there’s only so much a help desk can do in the face of bugs, cyberattacks, and the occasional hardware failure. It could be like giving an Uber driver five stars, Ivanti CSO Daniel Spicer told IT Brew.
“They know that the person is trying to help them,” Spicer said. “The Uber driver isn’t at fault because there is traffic.”
This “B” attitude could also have to do with how employees manage their own IT issues; nearly 40% reported solving the problem on their own because it’s faster than waiting on the desk to report back. That’s called “shadow IT,” Spicer said, and it can cause problems of its own as employees take matters into their own hands.
“Shadow IT comes from the desire to do my job, that I am not enabled to do my job, and so I need to either come up with my own work around, or go and find another solution, because it is not being provided to me,” Spicer said.
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Knock-on effects. There’s a lesson here for IT pros: As confidence in the help desk slips, security suffers, which in turn degrades trust further. It’s a vicious circle. Permiso Security Threat Research Manager Isuf Deliu told IT Brew attackers have been utilizing spoof attack emails from the help desk for years in order to target employees. Hacker group Scattered Spider has reportedly deployed the tactic.
“Even though they were controlled by those threat actors, they looked legit in order to increase their likelihood of success,” Deliu said. “They created Teams accounts and then initiated chats with their victims, pretending to be the help desk.”
For organizations facing the possibility of help desk spoofing—effectively any organization that could be the victim of an attack—eroding trust increases the attack surface. Help desk staff reach out to employees regularly, Permiso CTO Ian Ahl said, making it a rich threat vector.
“The help desk does ask you to install things at times, the help desk does ask you to take some actions, so you’re a little more likely to trust that,” Ahl said.
Projecting. There are ways forward. Ivanti suggests deploying AI and other automation solutions, noting that roughly one-third of help desks report they are slowed by repetitive tasks, long resolution times, and limited resources. Some 36% of employees surveyed reported they’d be just as happy with a chatbot answering questions, and 66% said a hybrid solution to help desk issues would be welcome.
“I think this is really doable, I think it’s actionable,” Spicer said. “I don’t think it actually requires a ton of effort.”