Most IT problems never become a ticket. Every day, employees deal with slow application response times, authentication errors, unstable VPN connections, and devices with excessively long boot times. In most cases, they do not open a report: they try to work around the obstacle, reboot, wait, or give up on the task entirely.

This almost invisible friction — digital friction — is one of the factors that most hinders productivity, and at the same time it is incredibly underestimated. The truth is that traditional service desk metrics, built around ticket volume and resolution times, fail to detect it.

For IT leaders, called upon to demonstrate the impact of technology on business outcomes — not just service levels — this is a strategic problem: what cannot be measured cannot be effectively managed, and what does not appear in reports continues to silently generate ever-increasing costs. Because these costs remain hidden, IT is perceived as a cost centre rather than a lever of value.

Digital friction is a cost that does not appear in reports

Digital friction is the unnecessary effort an employee must make in order to fully leverage data or technology during their work activities. Left unchecked, digital friction silently kills productivity and business growth, hiding in widespread, granular frustrations across your entire network.

Numbers help quantify the cumulative effect. A study from the University of California (Irvine) shows that, after an interruption, a person needs an average of more than 23 minutes to refocus on the original task. Added to this loss of time is the one linked to having to “jump” from one application to another in search of information: according to The Harris Poll survey for Glean, which involved 1,043 knowledge workers, employees lose an average of at least 2 hours per day — a quarter of the working week — searching for documents, information, or people needed to do their jobs. And the constant switching between tasks has a cognitive cost: according to the American Psychological Association, the mental micro-blocks generated by task switching can erode up to 40% of productive time, with a direct impact on employee productivity. On a broader scale, research by Foundry conducted for OpenText estimates that 95% of organisations experience some form of digital friction and that 82% of employees have experienced delays or missed deadlines due to technological obstacles.

The TeamViewer report on the impact of digital friction, based on a global survey of 4,200 managers and employees, confirms the economic scale of the phenomenon: 80% of respondents report losing time every month due to IT malfunctions, averaging 1.3 working days; 48% report delays on critical operations or projects; and 42% attribute direct revenue loss to digital friction.

The iceberg effect: why the service desk only sees what surfaces

The most revealing data point is not about the problems that are reported, but those that remain submerged. As Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer of TeamViewer, summarises, most employees frustrated by technology do not open any ticket: they suffer in silence until the small problem that appeared becomes a large one, and by that point the damage is done. It is an iceberg effect: the IT team only catches a few tickets — because they become visible — but those tickets are a small, surface-level fraction of a much larger problem.

A growing sense of distrust makes the situation worse. Still according to the TeamViewer survey, only 57% of workers trust their IT team to resolve problems quickly and effectively, while 40% resort to personal devices or applications to work around blockages, thus fuelling shadow IT (the use of hardware, software, or cloud services not approved or monitored by IT). Every unreported workaround is a unit of lost employee productivity and, at the same time, a security and compliance risk.

The point is that the classic service desk metrics — open tickets, average resolution time, first-contact resolution rate — only measure what surfaces. The IT support team cannot identify the “invisible” friction, the kind that users absorb without reporting it. This is why it is essential to adopt a different approach.

What DEX monitoring concretely measures

DEX monitoring is the monitoring of the Digital Employee Experience — the experience employees have in their daily interaction with corporate technologies, devices, and applications. Its logic is the opposite of the reactive approach of the traditional service desk. Instead of waiting for a report, DEX monitoring continuously collects telemetry data directly from endpoints and applications. It does not wait for the user to perceive the problem and perhaps decide to give up on resolving it.

Gartner describes DEX management tools as solutions that continuously measure and improve the performance of technology provided by the company and employees’ sentiment towards it.

In practice, DEX monitoring measures concrete signals such as:

• application performance, meaning the response and loading times of the software actually used;
• device resource overload, i.e. CPU, memory, and disk saturation that slows down work;
• crash rates of operating systems and critical applications;
• device boot times and user login times, often among the first sources of daily frustration;
• the quality of meetings and video calls, in terms of latency, packet loss, and audio-video issues.

To these objective indicators, DEX monitoring adds the detection of user sentiment, combining technical data with perception-related data. It is this correlation between performance measurement and lived experience that transforms telemetry into actionable information, and distinguishes experience monitoring from the simple collection of technical logs.

From “firefighter” to provider of preventive support

With continuous visibility into the state of endpoints and applications, the role of the service desk changes in nature. Today it largely operates like a firefighter: it intervenes when the fire has already broken out, that is, when the user finally gives up and opens a ticket. DEX monitoring, on the other hand, makes it possible to identify recurring patterns — a particular update causing an application to crash, a category of devices with abnormal login behaviour, a company site with degraded network quality — and to act before the disruption spreads.

This proactive visibility enables timely intervention through:

• Automated remediation of known and repetitive problems via self-healing automations.
• Preventive maintenance on device fleets showing signs of degradation.
• Prioritisation based on the real impact on employee productivity rather than the simple order in which tickets arrive.

The service desk stops reacting to symptoms and starts removing causes, reducing friction at the source.

The organisational changes needed to act on telemetry

Tools alone are not enough. Transforming DEX monitoring data into value that is actually produced requires some organisational changes. The first is a redefinition of performance indicators: supplementing classic service desk KPIs with experience and endpoint health metrics, so that IT success can be measured by the reduction of friction and not just by the speed of ticket closure.

The second is the creation of reliable feedback channels beyond the traditional help desk, because many problems will never be reported spontaneously.

The third is the clear assignment of responsibility: someone must own the experience data, analyse it, and translate it into concrete actions — otherwise the telemetry remains on a dashboard that no one looks at.

Finally, DEX monitoring must be integrated into existing ITSM processes — incident, problem, and change management — so that insights feed into the operational flow instead of remaining isolated. Without this integration, even the richest telemetry ends up being an analytical exercise with no concrete impact on people’s daily work.

From service levels to business outcomes

For IT leaders, reducing digital friction means recovering hours of productive work, containing the risks associated with shadow IT, improving employee satisfaction, and retaining talent.

The message for those leading IT is therefore clear: problems that never become tickets are still real costs, and they grow in severity, undisturbed, until someone decides to make them measurable. Giving visibility to these costs through DEX monitoring is the first step towards shifting the conversation from service levels to business outcomes, and towards demonstrating, with data in hand that a smooth digital experience is not a luxury but a direct lever of employee productivity.

FAQs

1. What is digital friction?

It is the unnecessary effort an employee must make to use data or technology in their work: slow applications, login errors, unstable devices. It often does not generate tickets, but continuously and invisibly erodes productivity.

2. How does digital friction reduce employee productivity? 

Every micro-interruption costs time and concentration: after a distraction, it takes valuable time to regain the right level of focus. Multiplied across thousands of people, these friction points can dramatically reduce productivity.

3. What does DEX monitoring measure? 

DEX monitoring continuously measures application performance, device resource overload, crash rates, device boot times, user login times, and meeting quality, integrating this objective data with user sentiment.

4. Why does the traditional service desk not detect digital friction? 

Traditional service desk metrics are based on open tickets, while most problems are never reported (this is the so-called “iceberg effect”). DEX monitoring bridges this gap through proactive and continuous visibility into endpoints and applications