Help desk support used to be hands on; it felt personal and conversational for the most part. Employees could walk up to a help desk, or a support agent might come to their desk to troubleshoot IT issues. These drive-by visits often ended with the help desk creating or closing out a ticket. Or in some cases, the employee was directed to a web portal or instructed to submit an email to request support. In any event, help was always around the corner.

With a distributed workforce brought on by flexible work, real-time support is hard to come by. Aberdeen research has found that when businesses rely on older help desk tools, they fail to provide the real-time, connected, and interactive support experience that today’s workers need. However, when organizations with hybrid work environments adopt modern solutions that incorporate conversational ticketing—making it possible to create and manage tickets and get real-time help desk updates using business messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack—they see significant gains.