Our ticket volume fell sixteen percent last year. Incidents did not fall. Average handling time went up by four minutes, and the satisfaction score, which I have never fully trusted, went down.
We listened to two hundred calls to find out why. In roughly a third of them the caller had already been given an explanation by an assistant of some kind, in their phone, in a browser, or inside a product we bought that now ships with one. In about a fifth they had already acted on it. Cleared a cache, reinstalled an application, changed a setting, deleted and recreated a profile, switched off something they were able to switch off. The analyst's first job is no longer diagnosis. It is finding out what has already been done to the machine, by somebody following confident instructions written by something that had never seen our estate.
The part I find harder to plan for is what stopped arriving. Small faults used to reach us as a trickle of low priority tickets, and that trickle was my early warning, my demand data, my evidence when I asked for money, and my only real picture of how the estate behaves in ordinary use. A monthly export in finance failed for three weeks this spring and nobody rang, because they had been told a workaround and the workaround was good enough.
That channel is going to keep thinning, and I do not think anything reverses it. The answers on the other side will keep improving and our users have no reason to prefer waiting for us.
So the work I can see is a shift from being told to measuring. The estate has to report on itself: device telemetry, application error rates, failed transaction counts by site, and somebody from my team physically standing in a depot once a quarter watching people work. It also means accepting that our configuration now drifts through helpfulness rather than through change control, because a fix somebody applied on the advice of a model is a change with no record anywhere.
For my whole career a quiet service desk meant things were working. Within a few years it will mean nothing at all, and I will need another way of knowing.
– Serguey Shinder
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