Less Friction, Fewer Tickets — A Better Service Desk Starts Upstream

Most service desks see only the tip of the iceberg. Every ticket is a moment a user decided the problem was worth reporting. And behind every reported problem sits a much larger volume of unreported friction: the workarounds, the quiet ten-minute losses, the frustrations vented to a colleague but never logged. This invisible layer is where digital experience is actually shaped, day to day, and where service desk demand is silently generated.

ITIL5 has formally recognised Experience Management as a discipline in its own right. But naming a practice and doing it are very different things, and Experience Management starts at a point most IT organisations are not yet equipped for: knowing where the friction actually sits. That requires more than excellent ticket registration; it requires a deliberate measurement discipline for the problems users never report.

This session offers the practical foundation: a model that connects friction measurement, user adoption, and service desk demand into one picture, and that ITSM leaders and MSP owners can use to intervene where the leverage is greatest. Drawing on patterns across Dutch enterprises, it offers a vocabulary, a method, and a business case for working upstream rather than scaling support.

This is not a tools session. It is about turning a framework ITIL has just named into something that lives in your service desk on Monday morning: starting with the friction you can’t yet see.