The Service Desk Institute (SDI) has been connecting service professionals across the world since 1988 and is the leading global community for everyone working in the service and support industry. Our mission is to inspire service desks and support teams to be brilliant.

With a passion for providing industry best practice and sharing knowledge, SDI is dedicated to guiding, inspiring, and connecting ITSM, service desk and support communities. A respected, trusted and independent advisor to the industry, SDI has inspired thousands of organisations and professionals around the world to embark on journeys of service improvement and to be the best they can possibly be. For more information, visit www.servicedeskinsitute.com

As organisations adopt experience data to optimise and enhance IT services, one critical question remains: how do we ensure the experience data truly improves the employee experience?
In this webinar, Sakari Kyrö from HappySignals explores how experience data—real feedback from end-users—can be used for better IT decisions. By aligning AI behaviour with what users actually experience and expect, organisations can avoid common pitfalls of automation and build systems that drive satisfaction, reduce friction, and deliver real value.
Join us to discover how bringing human experience into ITSM leads to better outcomes in day-to-day operations—from faster resolutions and fewer escalations to higher employee satisfaction and trust in digital services.

Top 3 Use Cases for using experience data in ITSM

Discover how ALVAO brings IT Service and Asset Management together in one simple platform. See how it connects with Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and Power BI, and how automation helps cut tickets, speed up self-service, and provide clear insights. No jargon, no long slides. Just a practical demo that makes daily IT work easier.

Key Takeaways

- Manage IT services and assets in one place.

- Get more value from Microsoft tools.

- Save time with automation and one-click actions.

Microsoft-native ITSM & ITAM

AI has been portrayed as the magic solution to offloading repetitive and time-consuming IT service delivery tasks from technicians, saving them valuable time and improving overall efficiency. However, for many organizations, that has not been the case, as they still struggle to leverage AI effectively and demonstrate returns on investment.

ServiceDesk Plus, ManageEngine's AI-driven unified service management platform,  provides high-value AI for ITSM teams without additional operational overheads or extra license costs. 

Watch on demand, to explore the practical applications of AI in ServiceDesk Plus to show how you can drive real efficiency in your IT service delivery using various AI capabilities and features available out of the box. 

Key takeaways for utilizing ServiceDesk Plus:

- Deliver exceptional experiences with conversational workflows powered by an AI virtual agent.

- Boost operational efficiency by automating mundane but crucial tasks like ticket categorization using intelligent predictive.

- Use GenAI to generate responses, summaries, custom functions and more.

Transforming IT service operations with practical AI in ServiceDesk Plus

In 2025, Stephen Mann (itsm.tools) and PeopleCert carried out research into how AI supports ITIL practices across modern ITSM tools. Watch on demand to explore the AI use cases featured in the study, discover key findings on how AI is shaping IT service management today, and gain insights into where it’s heading next.

AI and ITIL - Accredited Tool Vendors: Insights from 2025

This session explores how SCC has embedded Experience Level Agreements into its workplace strategy. Mark Franzen, UK Digital Workplace Experience Leader, shares how SCC evolved its approach from advisory and personal development to day-in-the-life analysis and outcome-based delivery. Through internal transformation and customer case studies, the session highlights how XLAs have helped uncover pain points, improve productivity, and reshape service conversations around what truly matters to end users.

Experience First: SCC’s XLA Journey Towards Measurable Outcomes

What if you could tap into millions of employee voices to guide your IT improvement strategy? In this session, we’ll explore the most common challenges employees face in their interactions with IT—and the proven methods organizations have used to overcome them. Backed by real-world feedback data, we’ll uncover:

- The main reasons for unhappiness in IT support is why the Service Portal often frustrates more than it helps.

- How to reduce ticket reassignments and improve resolution speed

- Why chasing high satisfaction targets can backfire - and what to do instead.

Whether you're just starting your ITXM journey or refining your continual improvement practices, this session will equip you with actionable insights that turn experience into measurable impact.

Turning experience into action: Common improvement areas as told by millions of people!

Power Design's journey supplementing traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) has shaped customer and employee experiences.

Josh begins by contrasting SLAs—focused on technical, process-based metrics—with XLAs, which prioritize user satisfaction, emotional impact, and journey-based outcomes. Using Power Design's ATLAS program as a case study, Josh demonstrates how the team reimagined operations to align with their mission, leveraging the innovative XM Tree framework.

This visual tool roots strategy in the customer journey, mapping touchpoints, identifying "Moments of Magic," and tracing outcomes back to foundational values.

Attendees will discover how Power Design's shift to XLAs empowered teams to exceed expectations, foster loyalty, and deliver memorable experiences that go beyond the numbers—transforming metrics from mere measurements into drivers of business success and customer delight.

From SLA to XLA: Turning Metrics into Magic

This session explores a user-centred approach to improving digital operational services, with a focus on making systems simpler, faster and more effective for all stakeholders. It highlights the importance of understanding both the practical and emotional experiences of users, gathering feedback and using insights to continuously enhance service delivery. Watch now to learn about the transformation of services in complex environments, including the challenges of integrating digital solutions in setting where traditional processes, such as printing, remain essential. The session emphasises how direct engagement with users can reveal critical insights, leading to meaningful improvements in service design, delivery and the overall user experience.

Tipping the Scales of Justice with XLAs

Get ready for a real-world business adventure! In "Scaling Peaks, Breaking the Service Sound Barrier: Unisys' Supersonic Leap to Experience," Patrycja Sobera reveals how Unisys made a bold move in 2020. The company shifted from a traditional IT provider to a global leader in experience management. Patrycja Sobera, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Workplace Solutions at Unisys, is a pioneer in experience management. She was instrumental in the company's bold 2020 pivot to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs), shifting the focus from traditional IT metrics to the actual human experience.

Under her leadership, Unisys created its first Experience Management Office, driving significant improvements in client productivity and employee engagement.

In 2020, Unisys reinvented itself by becoming the first major IT provider to center its business on experience. The company rebuilt its solutions around Experience Level Agreements (XLAs), which measure how employees and customers actually experience technology. Today, as a Global Founding Member of the XLA Institute, Unisys helps set industry standards. 

Patrycja's story is proof that betting on customer and employee experience can drive significant business success.

Scaling Peaks, Breaking the Service Sound Barrier: Unisys' Supersonic Leap to Experience

The Experience Economy is a rapidly evolving landscape, prompting a massive rethinking of experience design and management. In this dynamic environment, both commercial and public organizations are questioning how their culture, work methods, and leadership will evolve.

During the "Market of Ideas" session, Sarah Nicastro will facilitate an engaging dialogue with attendees and industry experts to explore the future of Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) and the direction of experience management. She will delve into the critical questions shaping this new era, guiding a collaborative exchange of insights on the path forward. This interactive session is a unique opportunity to contribute to the ongoing conversation about business transformation and the role of leadership in a human-centric economy.

The Market of Ideas

Every day, your team pushes the same boulder up the mountain - tickets pile up, users complain, and tomorrow brings the exact same challenges. But what if that rock could stay at the top? What if your service desk could actually prevent problems instead of just reacting to them?

The most successful IT teams have discovered something revolutionary: every major incident leaves breadcrumbs. This session reveals how Freshservice's intelligent incident management and CMDB capabilities help you connect those dots before disaster strikes.

What you'll discover:
o Predict before you react: Use Freshservice's incident patterns and CMDB relationships to identify brewing problems before they explode
o Connect the invisible dots: Map asset dependencies and change impacts that most teams never see coming
o Turn chaos into clarity: Transform scattered incident data into actionable intelligence that actually prevents future fires

This session is perfect for IT leaders tired of playing defense and ready to get ahead of their next crisis.

Your CMDB is lying to you: What Greek tragedies teach us about incident management (and how to fix yours)

How does a College based in Lancashire UK, become the first academic institution and public sector organisation to achieve 'World - Class' Service Desk Certification status? 
How did the IT Services department go from “uncertifiable” to 5-Star, and what impact and value has this created?

Join us for an exclusive session with Runshaw College’s Head of IT Services Alex Harding, as he shares their story, the challenges they faced, and the measurable outcomes they achieved.

In this webinar, you’ll discover:

• Runshaw's inspiring Service Desk Certification Journey
• Challenges and obstacles 
• How Runshaw improved productivity by +23% despite increasing ticket volumes
• How customer satisfaction (CSAT) rose from 4.5 to 4.96/5, climbing every year post-Certification.
• What it takes to embed a culture of continual improvement and sustain world-class performance.
• Return on Investment (ROI) figures to shout about.

Whether you’re a CIO, IT service leader, or service desk manager, this is your chance to hear real-world insights from a team that proved the ROI of IT support, gained industry recognition, and built trust across their organisation.

 Don’t miss the opportunity to learn how your service desk can follow in Runshaw’s footsteps and achieve staggering results like theirs.

The Road To World Class: How Runshaw Became The 1st Educational Organisation to Achieve 5 Star Certification

In this session, we will explore how Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) are revolutionizing service desk operations, enabling teams to "Automate, Elevate, Innovate". This session is designed for service desks seeking to harness AI and automation for greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Discover how AI has evolved into essential business infrastructure, representing a "fundamental paradigm shift" where AI agents actively solve problems. This empowers your team to become smarter, faster, and truly future-proof.

Rina will guide you through the "AI Paradox," demonstrating how to implement AI and automation to enhance—not replace—the human touch.  You'll learn to balance operational efficiency with emotional intelligence (EQ) by building automation strategies that preserve personalization and reinforce trust. 

This talk isn't just about improving your service desk; it's about building a high-impact, future-proof career in IT Service Management (ITSM). Rina will introduce her book, "The ITSM Playbook®," as your strategic roadmap to navigate corporate challenges and build a career path to a six-figure salary. Learn to communicate your impact beyond technical jargon, securing your seat at the leadership table.

The Super Agent: How a VPA Makes Your Team Smarter, Faster, and Future-Proof

Designing with intent: shaping trusted digital workers to serve with confidence and care

AI may grab the headlines, but Intelligent Automation (IA) is where real transformation happens. IA serves as the container that unites all automation tools and methods—including AI—into a coordinated system designed to deliver human-centered, outcome-driven results.This session explores how to achieve a sensible blend of human and AI-supported work—where assistants help you do more, stress less, and protect the quality of your results. Whether you operate in healthcare, finance, government, manufacturing, or within an IT organization, the principles of IA apply across all service-driven industries.You’ll learn why assist before you agentify is the smarter approach, how governance and guardrails sustain trust, and how data management ensures automation remains safe and meaningful. We’ll also decipher the emerging field of agentic AI—exploring the discrete designs and roles of assistants and agents—alongside the growing skills of prompt crafting (for assistants) and prompt engineering (for agent design). Finally, we’ll look at how cost control through measured consumption keeps innovation sustainable.This is automation done right—human-centric, outcome-driven, and ready for the next evolution of service management across every service-based enterprise.

When AI Works with You: The Human Side of Intelligent Automation

This session guides organizations on checking if they are ready for AI. It explains how to assess goals, data, infrastructure, skills, and culture before adoption. The focus is on setting clear expectations and starting small to avoid failure.

How to Assess AI Readiness for Service Delivery

While organizations are rushing to adopt AI, the question of governance and risk management is becoming more and more important.

How to balance the benefits of early adoption and effective management on AI risks? ITIL offers a practical AI risk management approach based on the ITIL 6C model for AI capabilities. It allows to identify and assess AI risks in the organization’s context and find relevant and effective countermeasures.

Watch this session to learn about:

·        The typical AI risks

·        The ITIL 6C model for AI functional capabilities

·        A practical approach to AI risk assessment and management.

AI in ITSM: the 6C model for planning and risk management

The three most common root causes of failed Changes are failed communication, poor underlying documentation(CMDB), and not getting “the right” approvals.  These 3 distinct causes all have a common denominator the processes required to execute well contrast with natural human behavior.  Communication is always a challenge in large organizations. No one enjoys keeping the CMDB up-to-date, and it’s easy to forget every single person who should approve a change and we end up going with the default people. AI can address each of these root causes efficiently and effectively. In this session you’ll be introduced you to a new process with AI augmentation that aligns with natural human behaviors. We’ve infused this process into our change enablement function and haven’t had a roll back since.

Utilizing AI in your Change Management/Enablement

AI is transforming service desks—but if we’re not careful, speed can come at the cost of connection.

In this session, Dr. Josh Nelson explores how to implement AI and automation in ways that enhance—not replace—the human touch. As service operations scale, the challenge isn’t just doing more with less. It’s doing better with intent.

You’ll learn how to build automation strategies that preserve emotional intelligence (EQ), personalize interactions at scale, and reinforce trust in every experience. Drawing from real-world insights, Josh will show how to identify where automation adds value—and where human connection still matters most.

Key takeaways:

How to scale service without losing personalization or empathy

Where to apply automation for real impact (and where not to)

Balancing operational efficiency with emotional intelligence

Building AI-driven workflows that feel intentional, responsive, and human

Walk away with a framework for delivering smart, scalable service—without sacrificing what makes it personal.

AI Meets EQ: Automating Service Without Losing Human Connection

What’s new in Version 9.0?

- Managing the AI System: Navigate AI with purpose—covering ethics, transparency, security & governance

- Updated Core Concepts: All 10 principles evolved to reflect today’s challenges and opportunities

- Beyond ISO: A deeper, broader, human-centric take on excellence—tailored for real-world service desks

How Version 9.0 of the Global Best Practice Standard for Service Desk can support your journey to excellence?

This presentation explores the different types of IT management benchmarks and highlights the common pitfalls in interpreting them. We’ll discuss why benchmarks vary, why they shouldn't drive goal-setting, and how to use them wisely to support informed decisions. Whether you're comparing across industries or tracking internal progress, this session will help you make benchmarks work for you, not against you.

Benchmarking in IT Management: What to Know and What to Avoid

You want to deliver an IT Service Centre capability that leaves your client (and their customers) not just satisfied but delighted. Deliberate changes that ensure understanding, have real impact, and then achieves external recognition in doing so.

Join us to cover such topics where we will explore several key considerations and points, such as:

 - The client commitment: What is needed, what do you understand and what do you do about it?

- KPI, SLAs and dashboards: Why do we have them, and what use are they?

- Real recognition: Where is the focus and how do you evidence the impact anything you measure really has?

Benchmarking: What do you want?

Towards a new era of ITSM benchmarking. The coming-of-age of concepts like digital experience combined with the power of big data and AI may finally help us make meaningful comparisons in the world of ITSM.

Towards a new era of ITSM benchmarking

How do you know when your service desk has reached its limit—before it breaks? This session explores how I used SDI benchmarking and Erlang modelling to calculate our true capacity, identify performance gaps, and build a smarter resourcing strategy. I'll share not only the math behind our model but also the cultural and operational shifts it has enabled. If you're still planning headcount by gut feel or best guess, this session will show you a better way.

 Key Takeaways:

- Benchmarking turns metrics in to meaning It’s not just about the numbers it’s about the context. SDI benchmarking helped us to understand where we stand, where we excel and where we need to improve.

- Capacity isn’t just a number, it’s a strategy With the right model we have been able to align resources to demand while avoiding burnout. We have also been able to justify strategic hiring decisions with confidence.

- You don’t need perfect data to start.

We began with some real data, but we also had to use estimates, refined our assumptions, and adapted as we learnd. Despite data gaps benchmarking still provided valuable insights that led to meaningful improvements and more informed decisions.

Breaking the Capacity Code: How Benchmarking Reshaped Our Service Desk

ITSM teams have achieved commendable results in service delivery by following established best practices. Yet, the advent of AI has raised that success ceiling, opening new possibilities for service excellence. The challenge now for ITSM practitioners is to implement AI in proven frameworks in a way that maximizes both the ROI and service value.

In this 20-minute session, I’ll show how AI can be seamlessly woven into ITSM practices to boost efficiency. Drawing from over a decade of observing small, medium, and large organizations, I’ll pinpoint where AI delivers the most impact and which process pain points matter the most.

We’ll explore real-world incident management and request fulfillment cases, pinpointing pain points in today’s best practice approach without AI, then reimagining these cases with AI enhancements to show just how much smoother and faster they can become.

Key takeaways

● Discover the seven-step AI roadmap for ITSM teams as service processes evolve alongside business growth.

●  See how to accelerate a multi-department travel request by applying conversational and agentic AI at key moments in the workflow.

●  Identify what AI capabilities you need at three maturity stages: foundational, advanced, and trailblazer.

Pushing the boundaries of ITSM best practices with AI

Learn to empower your frontline staff, use data to make educated guesses and how to embrace a culture of continuous improvement.

Experimenting and its benefits.

Service Desk Success Summit: Unlocking Best Practices and Benchmarking Brilliance

Freshworks has analysed 187+ million tickets from 10,743 organizations in 118 countries to deliver the most comprehensive view yet of service desk and IT operations performance. In this exclusive session, we’ll unveil the Freshservice Benchmark Report 2025—your data-backed guide to outperforming in the year ahead.

We’ll share the exact benchmarks across 7 core service management metrics, reveal how AI is transforming performance with up to 76.6% faster resolutions with Freddy AI Copilot, 65.7% ticket deflection with Freddy AI Agent, and 431,270 agent hours saved. We'll also unveil the first-ever benchmark for Enterprise Service Management (ESM), where HR, Finance, and other business teams are matching IT efficiency.

You’ll walk away knowing:- Where you stand compared to the world’s top-performing service teams- Emerging trends reshaping ITSM in 2025 - from AI adoption to unified asset management- Where to invest for maximum impact on efficiency, employee satisfaction, and business outcomes

Whether you’re optimising your current service desk, or expanding ITSM practices across the enterprise, this is your annual roadmap to staying ahead of the curve.

The State of Service Management in 2025: Benchmarking, Emerging Trends & Where to Invest Next

Best Practice

Benchmarking

Freshworks

Fresh service

Efficiency

Employee satisfaction

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The State of Service Management in 2025: Benchmarking, Emerging Trends & Where to Invest Next

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Service Desk Institute (SDI)